Diligent
by eilonwya10
Summary: Five years after Allegiant, the city faces a new threat, from an enemy that knows its every weakness. (Story builds out the world beyond the city, with new civilizations.)
1. Chapter 1

**_A/N:_** _Five years after_ Allegiant, _the city faces a new threat._

 _Takes place in the book-verse and contains spoilers for the entire book series. Originally conceived as a fix-fic/spite-fic to address issues raised in a sporking community, so if you view Four as a romantic hero, this may not be the story for you. The premise and the familiar characters are the property of Veronica Roth, while the remainder of the world-building is original. **Trigger warning:** Serums play a large role in the plot, with the resulting loss of autonomy to people dosed with them._

* * *

"Deanna Schneider is an agent of Marcus Eaton," I conclude. "I'm sorry."

Evelyn Johnson, the head of Chicago's Office of Immigration, folds her hands on her desk and shakes her head. Behind her, outside the window, construction rigs are repairing the train tracks damaged by the Diligent movement.

"Another small, feisty blonde," she says with a sigh. "Can you head off Tobias from announcing his engagement with her, Paloma? I'd like to at least spare him that humiliation."

"I'm not sure he's going to listen to me, after what happened last time."

"I wish he'd just kept dating you. I know where _you_ stand."

"Right behind you, as always." Because it's safe there. And because if I have my eyes on your food and your drink, on your city water supply and on your ventilation systems, on your immigrants and what they do, I can assure that nobody, ever, will make you forget me. "What are we going to do with her?"

"Could you take her out for drinks and see that she forgets everything?"

"I don't think she deserves to lose her whole personality."

"Did she replace a real Deanna Schneider, or is her whole family fake?"

"She _is_ the real one. Her history is seamless."

"Then she's a traitor."

"There are still people who'll care if she forgets them." I looked at the monitors for the Saint Paul experiment once, years after I'd been taken to the Bureau of Genetic Welfare and adopted. My parents were married to other people. The way they'd forgotten me, that day when I was ten, hadn't changed at all.

The one thing you can't do, my scientist foster-mother explained, was get the old personality back. Once erased, it was gone. I asked how that fit with genes controlling us, and she said something about hormones and behavioral predilections and "blood will tell."

"It's the humane thing to do," Evelyn says. Her eyes look weary, though it's only mid-morning. "Abnegation promised that the self was an illusion. In the old days, they would have said what I'm asking you to do was nothing more than helping a snake shed its skin."

xoxoxoxox

 _Experientia docet._ It's the Diligent motto, scrawled in red paint across boards covering where windows were blown out by a Diligent bomb last week.

Scaffolding runs up the gray-brown stone face of the building, swarming with workers in overalls. Now and then, a person eddies loose from the foot traffic along Chicago Avenue, pausing to sound out the words or, more often, to wave and yell to one of the workers.

It means _experience teaches:_ that the old ways, the familiar ones, the factions, were the right way to live. The Diligent believe our system, without walls or factions, will ultimately destroy the city.

As I weave between trees, pedestrians, and pedal-carts, following glimmers of sunshine through the ravine between tall buildings, it occurs to me that I don't know which of the old factions would have been responsible for repairing a damaged building.

xoxoxoxox

"That still makes my gut turn inside out," I say to Deanna Schneider as she executes a neat landing on the terrazzo floor of Water Tower Place, to the applause of shoppers.

"You've got to try it some time." She's almost laughing, tucking a strand of pale hair back into her bun as she unlocks the flying harness with a practiced one-handed move. A controlled fall of eight floors turns her cheeks pink and makes her eyes sparkle.

"We've got these ten percent off for the rest of the afternoon, folks," she says to the crowd. "You'll have to take the elevator up, but it'll be a lot more fun coming down!"

"How often do people buy?" I ask.

"Between you and me, almost never on the actual flying harness. But they scoop up Dauntless memorabilia, which does very nice things for the police budget. Everybody secretly wants to be a little bit Dauntless."

"Let me buy you a drink, if you're ready for a break."

She accepts almost before I finish the sentence. "The Julius stand got a shipment of hothouse grapefruit. They say it makes the kale smoothies totally radical."

We sit at a wrought iron table in a court surrounded by food stands. It's not that unlike one of the Fringe bazaars, except that after five years here, I'm not sure what to make of an entire stand devoted to oatmeal and another to food so spicy that it stings going down. If I want to eat nettles, I can go wander the wilderness like the bandits.

"I got a new health supplement," I say.

"Is it bootleg or official?"

"Bootleg." It's not, but that's the right answer to make Deanna hold out her cup. Serious, responsible Paloma Markham must be trying to fit in with the crowd that takes risks. Therefore, because I'm trying to be dangerous, whatever I give her must be safe.

I pour a vial of green serum into both of our drinks, telling myself that it's the right thing, the _kind_ thing. "I was trying to think of a good engagement present for you and Tobias. I looked at the Erudite shop."

" _Boring._ Nothing but dull old books. I told them they should do science experiments, like with making things turn color and blow up, and they just blinked at me like owls." Deanna sips, then takes a gulp. "That is _yum._ "

"I'll see if my supplier has more, if you like."

"I'd love that. Don't tell, but I think Tobias and I are going to elope. My grandmother's gone kind of nuts with wanting me married in black-and-white, and how it's not a real marriage if we don't go under the truth serum together, and I just. . . it seems so Candor, you know? I want to stand on top of the Hancock Tower and make promises with Tobias and then _swoop_ down onto the city together."

My eyes sting, which I'm going to blame on the grapefruit juice. "Traditions die if we don't remember them."

"But it's not my tradition. I wouldn't have chosen Candor. Faction before blood, right?"

"I wouldn't know. _Experientia docet?_ "

When Deanna lifts her cup to toast the Diligent slogan, I can convince myself that she deserves what's about to happen: not because she's a bad person, even though she's a part of bad things, but because she's sloppy. I wouldn't have fallen for that trick.

Deanna takes another gulp, swallows. Her blue eyes widen, then go blank.

"You can't take everything at face value if you're going to survive," I say, hoping she's already past losing herself. If it's the last thing she hears, it's a taunt. I want it to be advice for starting over.

She finishes the drink, slowly, so I finish mine, all the way to the pool of unmixed grapefruit juice at the bottom.

"This is really stupid," she says, "but I can't remember your name."

xoxoxoxox

"Tobias Johnson," he repeats for the third time.

Deanna shakes her head, smiling. "Have we met before?"

I shouldn't have brought Tobias here, to Deanna's family home in the old Candor district, but he got all misty in those dark blue eyes and set his jaw just so, looking mysterious and determined, the way he must have done in the old Dauntless days.

"It's like someone gave her the memory serum," Tobias says. He's a smear of darkness against the merciless white of the sitting room's upholstery. "You're sure you two were drinking the exact same thing?"

"Positive. Maybe she's allergic to something in a Julius."

His shoulders slump. "She'd probably be immune to the serum anyway. Like Tris."

I don't have to look across the room at the mirror, reflecting pale, golden Deanna as she clasps my brown hand, to hear Tobias' unspoken _and you'd be the one who doesn't remember even your own name._ Because she looks like Tris, who was genetically perfect, and I look like Nita, who wasn't.

xoxoxoxox

"I'm going to ask Johanna about testing people for serum immunity," Evelyn says when I tell her about Tobias' reaction. Behind her, the trains are running smoothly again.

"There's no need," I say soothingly. "Not that many people are immune to even one serum. Being lucid with the choosing serum and the fear serum. . . that was the genetic marker. Anything else is a fluke."

"It's a fluke that affects our security." She rubs her knuckles together. "I don't want to go back to the old days of fearing the Divergent, Paloma. I fought that."

"I know. I'm sorry." As an intern at the Bureau, I watched on the screens as Erudite did its best to wipe out the very population we were trying to breed, while the scientific debate raged over when and whether interfering would ruin the validity of the experimental results. My foster-mother said outright that this was idiocy, but she was out-voted. Her ineffective but well-meaning stand didn't save her when the rebels from Chicago released the memory serum.

Evelyn opens her desk drawer, only to slam it. "Everybody believes we're all alike now. And we are, as long as the serums are a bogeyman no one believes we use any more. Maybe I should have just had you shoot her after all."

xoxoxoxox

Fortunately, the city engineer at the Water Tower pumping station shuts off the valve before the fear serum in the water spreads beyond a couple buildings in the downtown core.

The Diligent waited for the shift of an engineer who was black as ebony before they made their move. He was originally from the Fringe. . . and, as it happened, sufficiently unaffected that he could see past visions of mobs chasing him with lead pipes, staying calm enough to turn the valve and save the city's sanity.

xoxoxoxox

"How much did you tell Deanna about the Bureau?" I don't want my tone to be accusatory, not when Tobias' face is gray and the corners of his eyes are red, but I need to know.

Marcus would have known about the serums from his time as leader of the Abnegation, but the old Chicago leadership had never figured out that they could be distributed in the water supply. That was Bureau knowledge. The old Erudite had a way of getting so firmly stuck on a line of research that they never saw other possibilities, and Abnegation repudiated the whole concept of asking questions, so I doubt Marcus came up with the pump station plot on his own.

"She wanted to know. I don't know. Everything. She was a good listener." He scrubs his hands over his face. There's a pile of dirty clothing under the boxing dummy hanging from the high ceiling of his apartment. "I can't stop loving her just because she's ill, Paloma."

"If she can't remember you, you may have to accept just being friends."

"She doesn't have to remember me. She just has to get to know me again."

The reason I'm here is that Tobias has applied for an open-ended leave of absence from his work as Johanna's assistant, so that he can tend Deanna. He wants to be with her around the clock.

Her family will probably allow it: explaining things over and over to the memory-wiped gets old fast. I did it for three days when I was ten, telling my parents that my brothers and I _lived_ with them, that they were _responsible_ for us. . . before I ran, not _to_ anywhere, just _away._ I ran through streets lined with garbage and flooded from broken fire hydrants, with wild dogs and dirty children who'd forgotten their parents, and the people in the white van found me huddled, exhausted and clutching a dirty ragdoll, on the steps of the big marble building in downtown Saint Paul.

"You're very brave to devote so much energy to her. She's lucky to have you."

I would have done this for my foster-mother, but the rebels from Chicago didn't allow it. I keep my hands flat on my thighs, though they want to clench at the thought that _I destroyed Deanna, the same way the Bureau destroyed my parents, the same way Chicago destroyed my new family._ It is better than death. It is better than the end of civilization. It has to be.

Tobias forces the kind of smile we make over memories of the dead. "Deanna's always been the person I could tell anything to. She wanted to hear all about Tris, the Bureau, the rebellion, everything. I haven't been able to talk to anybody like that, not even Christina."

xoxoxoxox

"I told Tobias not to make her into Tris, and he punched me," Christina says. She lets me fall in step with her as she walks along the block through newly restored buildings north of the old Merciless Mart. A stretch of lower roofs and nearer sky feels both nostalgic and eerily exposed.

Though we're co-workers in the same bureau, it's unusual for us to be out in a neighborhood together. Christina's more of a social worker, as she can't stand being sedentary or indoors, so she's the first person to tell confused immigrants to get their chin up and apply themselves to a new job. She knows my work involves background checks, and that's all she knows.

"Did you like her?"

"No." She bites the word short, but her Candor background won't let her leave it there. "I thought she was way too eager to play the part of Tris. I would have told him to back off and let me be me, but she was always after him to tell her one more Tris story."

"What was she like, growing up in Candor?"

"She'd take the _dare_ option when we played Truth or Dare." Christina smacks at a weedy shrub with her clipboard and nods to a young couple moving a sofa from a solar truck. "Most people don't, unless they're hoping the dare will be something they want to do, like kissing their crush. Deanna would take it just to take it, then she'd be disappointed if it wasn't something like jumping off the roof. I didn't hang out with the younger kids much, but we got along fine, playing Truth or Dare."

"You jumped off roofs?"

"Not the way Dauntless do, from a moving train, seven stories up, but I'd done a second-story balcony. And I'd _climbed_ up four stories, but I got to climb back down. Deanna could at least think of good dares, I'll give her that."

Christina tosses a handful of candies to kids who call her _missus,_ shoots me a sideways glance, and adds: "I wouldn't have expected her to join the Diligent. When Tobias and I got back from. . . the place you came from. . . everyone seemed different. I figured it was because we'd changed. I didn't think about whether they'd changed."

I'm trying to decide how to ask her why she thinks Deanna was in the Diligent, without giving away that she's guessed right and that I know she's guessed right, when Christina suddenly giggles.

"You know what's funny?" she says in the breaths between laughter. "We saw the Dauntless kids jump on and off trains every day, and it never occurred to us to dare each other to do that. Isn't that the most?"

The couple with the sofa has set it on the sidewalk and are sprawled across it, clutching their bellies as they laugh.

Amity serum. In the _air._ It has to be.

I'm immune to that, too. The scientists at the Bureau tested me: immunities to the Abnegation memory serum, the Amity mood serum, and the Candor truth serum. The effects of the Dauntless fear serum are amplified so that I'm stuck in hours of terrors, while the choosing simulation serum just turns into a chaotic hallucination. Some versions of Erudite's mind-control serum work on me; some don't.

The scientist who became my foster mother drew the line at trying the death serum on me, saying that from what they knew about my genes so far, I was too valuable to risk that way.

Evelyn is, thank goodness, one of the few Chicago leaders who's embraced the new portable phones, like we had at the Bureau. I tell her what's happened, as tersely as I can. There's little she can do other than tell people to cover in place. Stop the trains, take any system that requires judgment down to minimal sustained operation.

Christina is telling me knock-knock jokes that are mostly faction slurs on Erudite. If I leave her here. . . I don't know if the Diligent are trying to make a point, or if there's a follow-up that's going to involve slitting people's throats while they're too busy chuckling to protest. I could be leaving her to her death. I could be running to mine. There could be a second serum on the way that I'm _not_ immune to.

xoxoxoxox

"You really don't know Tobias?" Christina says between hiccups. "That's _hilarious._ "

Deanna pats her hand. Nothing in the air has reached this older neighborhood. Nothing. Yet. "He's very nice."

"Nice is not the word _anybody_ has ever used to describe Tobias."

He glares at Christina. His eyes are always red around the edges, now, and his shoulders never spring back from their hunch. "Deanna knows me better than you do, maybe."

It's Tobias who reaches for the tray carried by Deanna's grandmother. The tray, like everything else originally Candor, is stark black and white: a checkerboard pattern where each tiny, handleless ceramic cup sits neatly on a square surrounding the striped teapot. Half the cups are glazed white, half black.

The tea he pours is greenish, with leaves swirling in its depths. It tastes of flowers and grass.

"I've had so much tea, I feel like I'm going to float away," Deanna says, but she drinks anyway. We all do: the new serum attack may be Amity good-fellowship, but what I feel is mostly fear, and I bet Tobias feels the same.

"Thank you," Deanna says to Tobias as he refills her cup. "That's very nice of you. Are you going to tell me how Tris loved this tea?"

Christina guffawed. "Tris hated tea. She said it was like drinking dishwater."

"That was Abnegation tea," Tobias says. "You don't own her memory, you know."

"Neither do you."

Deanna smiles over her cup. "Sometimes, from the way he keeps chattering about her, I think I must be her, and I just forgot. Is that what happened?"

"No," I say quickly. "Your name is Deanna Schneider. You were born Candor."

"I want you to be Tris," Tobias says. "Sometimes I think I'd have to put you in Abnegation, but there isn't Abnegation any more. They all got killed, except my father, and my father was sent away, so all the Abnegation virtues were lost. Nobody wants to be selfless any more."

"Knock knock," Christina says loudly.

She repeats it so that we can't speak over it. On the third round, I ask: "Who's there?"

"Marcus Eaton."

Tobias winces.

"Marcus Eaton who?" I say, to have this over with.

"Mark us eatin' my words 'cause I'm a big, fat liar." She dissolves into a ripple of laughter.

"Grandma brings me big books on laws and helps me sound out the words, and I think I like those, but then Tobias tells me that Tris hated books and reading." Deanna taps her cup on the tray. "I don't think I hate them. I think it's rude to tell me I shouldn't like things because some dead girl didn't. Who made you the boss of me?"

"Fate. God. I don't know. You're just like Tris. You were. Except for being selfless, and we were working on that. You were getting better."

"Knock knock."

"Who's there?" I ask quickly.

"Four." That was Tobias' old nickname, back in Dauntless. It's one of the things Christina told me when I was dating him, in his short interlude between spunky blond Cassandra, whom I'd tricked into cheating on him after I traced _her_ back to Marcus Eaton, and spunky blond Deanna.

Cassandra had been found floating in the river, her neck broken. If I'd expected her Diligent cronies to take revenge that way, I would have sent her somewhere safe.

"Four who?"

"Ask not for whom the bell tolls, for it tolls for thee."

"Shut up!" Tobias snaps. "You've always had too big a mouth on you-"

"The better to eat you with!" Christina bites playfully at Tobias' arm, but the way he swings it to slam into her mouth isn't playful, and there's blood on her lip, after, even though she can't stop chuckling.

"That's mean," Deanna says. "I don't like you."

"You mouth off any more, there'll be more where that came from."

Words throb against my lips: how he makes himself a patsy about women, how his violence makes him look weak, how I feel sorry for him. These aren't things I _want_ to say. I don't want to see Tobias hurt or angry. I feel as if I'm shoving the words away when I push him so that it's his arm that sends the teapot flying, shattering in a splash of green across the checkerboard tile floor.

"What the hell, Paloma?" He's got the whole glare with his eyebrows drawn together and his dog teeth visible. If I put the sofa between us, he'll interpret it as fear. If I don't, he may take a swing at me next.

I pitch my voice as calmly as I can, although my heart is racing with the urge to flight. There's no _away_ to run to, no white van to rescue me. "There's Candor truth serum in the tea."

"Then tell me. Did you erase Deanna's memory? Were you that jealous of her?"

"No."

"No to which?"

"No is the answer you're getting. Don't shake your fist at me, Tobias."

"You're immune to the truth serum. She's not. You never told me that."

"I can't tell you what I don't know." Being able to lie steadies me. "What difference could it have possibly made to you, anyway?"

"It didn't make a difference because it was just _Tris._ Tris was special. They told me it was a difference on people's genes, and I believed them, but Tris proved that it didn't matter, that it was just that she was unique, and genetics didn't mean anything for the rest of us. The whole genetic damage thing was made up and we could throw it away, and now it turns out you've got it, when you don't even _look_ like Tris. You aren't Tris, but if Tris wasn't unique, then we're really broken, all of us, after all-"

"Tobias, slow down. You're jumping to conclusions."

"We're broken and people like you _lied_ to us-"

"Knock knock. Knock knock!"

It's Deanna who answers Christina this time. "Who's there?"

"Bloody tooth."

"Bloody tooth who?"

"Bloody twooth is eluthiv." Christina spits blood around gales of laughter. Deanna bites her knuckles.

"Immunity matters only because the Diligent are using the serums to destroy us. Tobias, don't even _think_ of hitting me."

"I'll think whatever I want. I was immune to one of Erudite's serums, too."

"Exactly. It's just a thing. If it weren't for the Diligent misusing the serums, it wouldn't come up. We'd all be equal."

"So it doesn't matter at all, except for the part where it's critical to our survival. That really makes me feel good, Paloma."

xoxoxoxox

"I want to go talk with my father," Tobias tells Evelyn. She's spent the last hour in a meeting where Johanna and the other city leaders argued over whether strategy is even a thing against these latest attacks. I was the person who got to explain how the Bureau never tested mixing serums because there was no conceivable circumstance, under the faction system, where a person would take two serums at once.

"Johanna's considering sending a team to shoot him. Do you want to be on it?"

"Maybe. But I want to talk with him first. Maybe I don't like the future of my city always hanging on how much my parents hate each other on a given day."

The color rising in Evelyn's cheeks matches the red splotches on Tobias'. They look alike: angular, olive-skinned, tense with alertness against threats that are proving all too real.

"You can go on one condition."

"That I shoot him? I won't agree to that."

"That Paloma goes with you, and she has a supply of the memory serum. If she thinks Marcus is a threat, or she thinks he's lying to you, she's authorized to use it."


	2. Chapter 2

_**A/N:**_ _The premise of_ Divergent _and the character of Tobias are the property of Veronica Roth._ _ **Trigger warning:** Serums play a large role in the plot, with the resulting loss of autonomy to people dosed with them. There is also physical and psychological horror._

* * *

Visiting the old Bureau is like walking among ghosts. Tobias' friends, old and new, thump him on the back and pat him on the shoulder. My foster-mother, washing glassware in a lab, looks at me as if we've never met.

I walk over to her anyway because I want to see her close up again, even if I can't hug her. The white streak in her dark hair is wider, though she's cut it all in fringes rather than pulled it back in a bun. The line between her eyes is deeper. Her nails, which used to be cut square, are rounded and polished in bright orange, and the blouse under her lab smock is flowered. Even her perfume is different: heavy and spicy, rather than clean and green.

"Paloma Markham," I say, holding out a hand. She shakes it.

"Alice Markham. Are we related?"

"You could say that." The chemical air in here stings my eyes a little. I should have stuck to raiding the library while Tobias was discussing mass quantities of serum antidote with his friends. "How are you doing?"

"I'll be a high school graduate any day now. No more grinding through Suzanne Collins and memorizing the key products of Dallas! Cross your fingers that I get my engineering scholarship."

"Not neuro-chemistry?"

Her frown is more familiar than the smile from a moment before. "I don't want to be like the people who did this to me." She puts a hand on my arm and for a moment, she's my mom again. "They've shown me Alice Markham's old publications. She must have been very good. I just can't imagine being her. I'd rather build things than take them apart."

"Do you ever look at her other things?"

"There's a drawer full of pictures, but nobody can tell me who these people are. I used to try to match them with the people I work with, but there were so many faces I couldn't figure out, and everybody just shrugged. So I figured it was her life, not mine. The old Alice Markham is dead. She took half my life with her, and sometimes I want to yank it back, but at least I get this half."

Deanna's vacant smile blurs in my mind with Cassandra's empty eyes as she was fished from the river. "Do you think she would have chosen this? If the alternative was death, I mean?"

"I don't think she knows the difference. _I_ like being alive, but I'm not her." Her social smile settles back into place. "This is one of those psychology tests, isn't it? I can almost set the clock by when someone will check up on us."

She fishes in a pocket beneath her lab coat, pulls out a phone, and taps her way to photos. "Here's my husband." The balding man is a scientist she used to call _old crabby-pants._ "We have three kids, though the oldest two probably started out as someone else's. We're a family. We're very normal, except for having memories that start five years ago."

"I used to be your daughter," I say. I regret it even before she shakes her head and pats my arm.

"I'm sorry. I'm sure the old Alice Markham loved you very much, but she's not me."

xoxoxoxox

"I wanted closure, and I guess I got it," I say to Tobias as I steer our solar-powered van onto I-90 westbound. He's slumped in the passenger seat, a gun cradled negligently in his lap.

"It isn't closure to want the person to still care about you. That's the opposite of closure. Driving wasn't one of my fears, you know."

"I didn't want my foster-mother to be longing for me. I mean, I did leave. Once the dust settled, I could have insisted on going back to Alice Markham and befriending her."

"I just never had to drive. We had trains."

"You still have trains. I like your trains." On either side of the wide, flat road, the city is unraveling into the burnt-out factories and half-demolished suburbs of the Fringe. To the right, there's a cluster of clean, new houses, bright white in the afternoon sun, so some new government program must have been started. Other than one car that blinked its lights at us, the road is ours.

"Not the kind of trains we have now, where it's all 'train is departing, please stand clear of the doors.' They never stopped. They didn't care about us. If you wanted a train, you ran for it and you jumped for it, and catching it meant something. I did that. And when Tris died, I wanted to take the memory serum and forget the whole thing. Be some other version of myself."

"But you didn't." Stating the obvious is sometimes what people need, to tell their stories. I do it all day, in shops and bars and cubicles at the office, making sure people are who they say they are, or at least that their lies aren't dangerous.

"I figured I could be some other version of me anyway. I feel like the Diligent dosed Deanna with memory serum to get at me."

That was. . . not the conclusion I thought he'd drawn. I am careful not to show any change in expression that can't be explained by vigilance toward the highway. There's a gray car coming up the loop from I-290, and I want to stay well back so it doesn't see us as a threat.

"Your father," I say because that's safely stating the obvious.

"I don't see how he knew what Deanna would mean to me. Is something wrong with the van?"

"I don't see how he wouldn't. It's better not to get too close to other cars."

"Why?"

The question is so unexpected that I glance sideways and catch Tobias' dark blue gaze.

"It's all empty, isn't it?" he says. "The cars are from other places like the Bureau."

"Not exactly." After his outburst with the Candor serum, I don't want to upset him again. "People live here. They didn't fit well in the society you've seen."

"Like the Fringe."

My comforting half-answer is blown off my lips by the roar of a motorcycle behind us. I can see in the rear view mirror that the rider is hunched over his handlebars, long hair whipping behind him.

"Hold up the gun," I tell Tobias. "Let him see it. Don't aim it at him."

He lifts the gun as if he's sighting along it forward, through the windshield.

The motorcycle draws level with us. He's got goggles on, but I'm careful not to do anything that could be taken as making eye contact. He bares his teeth in what might be a smile.

Then his wrists flip and the cycle roars off ahead of us down the road.

xoxoxoxox

"We're getting closer to something," Tobias says, shifting his grip on the gun. He hasn't set it down for the last ten miles. I lost count of the motorcyclists whipping past us after the sixteenth.

"Rockford."

"Is it an experiment?"

"No." Three motorcycles emerge from the ramp of a structure that stretches across the highway, half bridge, half building. They circle dizzily around us, then fall into a formation, one to each side and one behind us. The only direction I can safely go is forward. Accelerating to the white-knuckle speeds I associate with Tobias' driving doesn't lose them.

Unlike Tobias, I can hold the van to the road at these speeds. Going into the ditch only gets us a different set of problems.

"Is it a place we want to go?" Tobias asks.

"We'll make it work."

xoxoxoxox

The long run through the countryside, after we leave I-90, attracts more motorcycles. They pop out of widely separated driveways that lead to concrete block buildings or to boxes with signs that read Union 76 or Shell. The land between them runs wild.

Then there's more flatness, interspersed with metal beams pointing to nowhere and side roads that end in rubble. The grass here is stubble.

It's a relief when we cross a river and buildings rise around us, low and old and reddish brown in crenellations, like the warehouses just beyond the Amity lands, or gray and boxy, like the factories verging on the Fringe. Women, most of them slung with babies, turn to watch our escort. One woman, young and wild-haired, waves to the motorcycles. Barefoot children run after us, but even at the sedate speed suited for city streets, we leave them behind.

Our escort guides us between pillars onto a cracked pavement edged by grass and flowers. We're moving at a crawl now, between groups of children playing. My stomach contracts at the sight of rows of some sort of animal, slung from poles, being stripped of their hide by women who work in thin, clinging shifts plastered to their bodies with sweat and blood.

The motorcycles stop in front of a pavilion, so we stop too.

Three women, all with plaits of gray hair to their waists, all with stiff, bunchy layers of pleated skirts under their buttoned sweaters and chains of pearls, are the first to emerge from the pavilion. They walk around our van, ring-encrusted hands folded over their bellies, as if they mean to sniff it.

The man who descends the pavilion steps wears pants cut off above the knee and enough gold chains to be measured by the pound. His blond-streaked hair falls full and wild over scarred, muscular shoulders and a belly that's starting to sag. I don't know what his face looks like because I'm not fool enough to look at it.

Neither are the motorcyclists. They step off their bikes and kneel, tilting their heads sideways and pulling their jackets and scarves aside to show their throats.

"Go in peace," the man says, and they back away, but they don't leave. The old women's hands claw at our van doors. We're supposed to get out.

"Do exactly what they did," I tell Tobias as I tuck the ignition activator in my pocket. My legs are surprisingly stiff; my knees, surprisingly wobbly.

He slams his door and marches straight up to the king of the pride, eye to eye. At least he's left the gun in the van. "Tobias, don't," I whisper. "Show him your throat."

The king cuffs Tobias across the face.

Tobias hits him back. I hear the smack of knuckles into bone a second after I see Tobias' fist move, as if my ears can't believe what's in front of my eyes.

The king sends a fist into Tobias' stomach, doubling him over, then they're both flailing at each other. "Don't," I say, but nobody's listening.

Tobias leads with an elbow, which the king bats aside, moving in to kick at Tobias' ankles. Tobias slips on the grass, arms windmilling as he goes down, one fist catching the king under the eye. A hand tugs me back as they roll toward us in a tumult of punches.

"Your man fights well for you," the young woman says. She's small and blond, compact under the white shift, which is streaked with blood where she's wiped her hands. The blade she's holding is clean, though.

"He's not my man. He just gets in fights." The king scrambles to his feet, but Tobias grabs his ankle and pulls him back down.

"Pamela," she says. Then she leans up on her tiptoes and touches her nose to mine. She smells like sweat, grass, and iron.

"Paloma."

"Your name says you're from my litter." Her grin bares sharp teeth.

"Is there a way to stop this?"

"If your man taps out. We get a few, so starving out there that they come and get beaten so their women and children can eat. I think yours wants to win, though." Pamela spins the knife's thick handle between her palms. Around us, the crowd whistles and shouts.

"If he loses?"

"Maybe he shouldn't. Lots of us would like a young king."

Tobias grunts as a punch connects with his shoulder, then ducks under the king's arm and jabs at his belly between the arcs of gold chains. The king's body is coated in sweat. Tobias has a purpling bruise on his cheek. They circle, both breathing heavily, feinting for an elusive advantage.

"We need to go without joining your pack," I say.

"If he wins, maybe there's another to take the kingship from him."

"Too slow."

She holds the knife out to me, handle first. I don't know what she expects me to do when I accept it. The only rule I ever knew about this place was that you _don't_ challenge the leader for dominance. I'm not going to stab a stranger who was only acting as his society says he should.

I'm not going to stab Tobias, either, because that would ruin our mission, put our entire world at risk, and deeply upset Evelyn. I'm going to use the heavy hilt and hit. . .

. . . the king.

He shakes his head and I think I've accomplished no more than a fly and then his knees give way and I'm afraid I've done worse - you can do serious brain injuries this way - but I'm yelling to Tobias to run and he _isn't running._

He's going to stand there, the idiot, so I'm running for the van, footsteps and hot breath behind my shoulder, and my hands are shaking as I trigger the ignition. It's Pamela who's with me, so I shove her across my lap to the passenger seat and gun the van toward where Tobias is _trying to help the king up, no don't do that,_ and when Pamela squeezes the door latch, I turn so the opening door catches Tobias in the ass.

"In!" I say as he rolls. He's not going to do it until he sees blond Pamela holding out a hand, and then his face lights. I've got to _drive_ so I don't watch this after she's pulled him far enough into the van that he's not going to fall out again, and I don't know my way through these streets but we came in on a bridge,

"Not that way," Pamela says. "Turn left, then right." Tobias is halfway across her lap. His lip is split and he looks dazed.

"That doesn't look like the way back to the highway we came in on."

"It's not. You want to get to someone else's territory."

"Why'd you stop the fight?" Tobias asks. "I was winning."

My entire insides go hot with rage. "Did you _want_ to be king of a pride of-" I cut myself off before I can say _genetically modified bandits_ because that would be rude, in front of Pamela.

"Leontari," she supplies. "It would have been temporary only."

She looks around, sniffing the air. The brick buildings are already lower and further apart, with trees and wide spaces of cracked cement between them. A mottled cow trots across the emptiness. "Another right, then left again."

This route takes us away from buildings entirely, onto a wide road between unmown fields.

Tobias sits up, fumbles in the storage compartment for a first aid kit, and swallows a painkiller, dry. "What are Leontari?"

"The true people," Pamela says. "The perfected people." So she's heard enough stories that my telling Tobias the truth won't shake her world.

"They were the first attempt to eliminate fear. Scientists gave their ancestors lion genes."

One of Tobias' eyes is starting to swell shut, but he uses the other to stare at Pamela as if he expects her to grow whiskers and meow.

"What's a lion?" he asks.

xoxoxoxox

"She was so much like Tris," Tobias says. He's got salve all over his face and is sipping fruit juice from our supply. The numbness in his voice could be emotion, or he could just be numb.

We dropped Pamela off a few miles back, where a side road ran dustily into the woods - toward the range of a desirable young male who'd appreciate the news that the king was already exhausted by a fight. Her three-cornered smile as she touched noses to me in parting suggested I ought to be happy if I'd given the king a concussion.

Maybe she was right. Maybe it was for the better to change leadership - I had no way of knowing how her opinion was biased, but she was our ally. I still would prefer to not interfere in things I don't understand.

My fingers feel clamped to the wheel. I explained to Tobias all about how the ancestors of the Leontari broke out of their protective confinement and made homes for themselves in some of the cities ruined and abandoned in the war. Things learned at age sixteen sometimes don't come out sounding entirely sensible when they're repeated back as an adult, but this is what I know.

The women work; the men hunt. Of the men, only the king can live in the city and only the king is supposed to father children. The men fight for dominance, so looking the king in the eye was a signal that Tobias meant to depose him.

"Lions have a reputation for being brave," I explain again.

"David never told us any of this. Nita never told me any of this."

"Both David and Nita had agendas of their own." I need, more than anything, a bathroom break. Pissing in the woods gives privacy but also cover for everything from wild animals to other kinds of bandits.

"They have to act like that because they have lion genes?"

"They say they do. The Bureau believed it. There are three who've come to Chicago, and they fit in fine. They don't get in fights."

I let that last sentence hang between us as I pull onto a frontage road and reach into storage for sanitary hand wipes and a plastic bag. The woods will have to do. "Bring the gun and cover me, okay?"

"We overthrew the bureau because genes don't matter, but you're telling me this entire society is different because genes control everything they do."

"We _don't know that._ " The amount of relief my bladder feels doesn't justify my hands and knees trembling. "I told you. If they come to Chicago, they assimilate."

Wiped and re-zipped, I take the gun so Tobias can have his turn. There's enough breeze that I can't count on movement and rustling as a sign that someone - or something - is near. I have to scan the endless groves for suspicious activity without knowing what's truly normal.

"Then I could have made them different, if I won. I could have healed them, if you hadn't stopped me."

He emerges from behind a tree, wiping his hands. I have to hold out the bag to stop him from dropping the wipe into the underbrush. The moving shadows of leaves mix with his bruises, making him look more battered.

"Do you want to know what would have happened if you'd lost?" I keep my voice level because really, it's okay now. Rockford is miles behind us. The situation is resolved.

"I wasn't losing. I could have made a difference."

"If you'd lost, you would be a junior member of the pride. Like the young men on motorcycles. You wouldn't be allowed to have sex with any of the women-"

"I don't rush into sex-"

"And I would have been expected to join the women and take my turn with the king. I wasn't going to do that. I'd have come up with a way to avoid it and escape. But what in the name of Chicago's founders were you _thinking_ to put me at that kind of risk because you can't follow simple instructions but _have to_ get into a fight with the first stranger you see?"

Slamming my hand into the side of the van feels surprisingly good.

"You didn't tell me about that risk."

"I told you to avert your eyes like the motorcycle men did. It wasn't hard."

"I'm not some five-year-old that's just going to do things without being told why."

" _Why_ is very simple." I have to unclench my teeth to keep going. "I know more about this world than you do. There wasn't a lot of time for explanations."

"Whose fault is that?"

"The point is, you didn't know what risks you were taking. You plunged in, against my informed advice, because the question of what risks you were taking didn't even occur to you. Can you see what's wrong with that?"

His face is stony as he climbs in on the passenger side. "Maybe I have lion genes, too."


	3. Chapter 3

_**A/N:** The underlying premise and Four are the property of Veronica Roth. The world outside the city and the Bureau are original. __**Trigger warning:** Serums play a large role in the plot, with the resulting loss of autonomy to people dosed with them. There is also physical and psychological horror._

* * *

If I hadn't been angry, I would have looked closely at Tobias before he started nodding off. When I glance sideways at him now, not willing to take my eyes off the endless gray road for long, I try to remember if his pupils looked unevenly dilated when we were arguing in the woods.

"Do you have a headache?" I ask.

"If I have lion genes, what do Abnegation have? Worm genes?"

"Ant. Self-sacrificing for the good of the whole. Except you were born Abnegation, so you wouldn't be part lion anyway. Do you have a headache?"

"What difference does it make?"

"I'm worried you might have a concussion."

Tobias snorts. "I got those all the time in Dauntless. They're no big deal."

My stomach clenches, but I'm not going to argue about brain trauma with someone who might have it. "It would make me feel better if we got you checked out. There's a town coming up that's safer."

"So I've got to act like a wimp because you're feeling selfish?" He slumps further down in his seat, squinting and bruised.

"You've got to take care of your health for the good of the mission."

"I'm _fine._ I'm not a five-year-old."

I'm probably wrong. He's not slurring his speech, and surely I would have _noticed_ if something was seriously "off" about him earlier. Maybe his head's made of rock. Maybe all the hard blows were to his torso.

Absolutely, certainly, I don't want to have to tell Evelyn that I'm returning her son to her with brain damage. So when we pass a faded sign that reads _Welcome to Wisconsin,_ I start looking at the sporadic, collapsing houses and abandoned factories for clues of the route to the Children of Peace.

I'm honking outside their compound gates, set in a fence constructed from rubble and barbed wire, before Tobias reacts. "If this is about having some doctor fuss over me, forget it."

"It's about getting information." That's as true as the other. All we know about Marcus' faction in Madison is what the Diligent have revealed through acts of terrorism. I'd like to have more to say to Marcus Eaton than _please stop._

"It's my mission," Tobias says. "I decide what we need for it."

I wave him silent as a person in a metal helmet, toting a gun, approaches. He or she - the Children of Peace say _zhe_ \- wears a long tunic, bound with bandoliers, over jeans and boots.

"Name and purpose?" The voice is light and neutral, as neutral as the guard's expression or zher cool blue eyes.

"Paloma Markham and Tobias Eaton. From Chicago. We come in peace and mean no harm."

"Your friend don't look peaceful."

Tobias' eye is darkening and swelling, and he's got another bruise at the corner of his jaw. If he wasn't grumbling about how it's _his mission_ , I could say he was the victim of a beating. But the thing with comforting lies is that they need to be halfway plausible or they don't provide much comfort.

I'm not going to take responsibility for Tobias' good behavior within the compound, either. He winces when I put a hand on his knee, which could be bruises or just irritability. "I'd like a break, and this is a safe place where they may have useful information. They are very, _very_ committed to non-violence. Can you promise to do nothing aggressive for a couple hours?"

"She's got a gun," Tobias points out.

"We keep them pointed toward the outside world," the guard says.

"If I screw up, do they dose me with happy serum like the Amity?"

"Nope." The guard's voice is cheerful. "If you don't respond to love and trust, we shoot you like the mad dog you are."

Tobias grins back. "I can handle that."

The guard waves us through the gates, into a gravel yard where the van is searched. Around us, brick buildings with white pillars and pediments rise from neatly planted crops. The field nearest us is corn, filled with a chanting song from teenagers in short tunics as they do something to the unripe heads, row after row, counting off their progress with flags.

"What are these people?" Tobias asks, folding his arms and scowling.

"They're the Children of Peace. They came here after the wars."

"No. What genes did they get? They're obviously Amity."

"They didn't." This is going to be difficult to phrase tactfully. "They're not genetically modified, as far as anyone knows. They just came here and live this way because they want to."

The guard comes up beside us, squinting in the bright afternoon light. "You're all clear. I'm supposed to take you to one of our councilors."Zhe pulls off zher helmet to reveal chin-length blond hair. "The polite thing to do is to offer to help zher with whatever zhe's working on."

"What's your name?" Tobias asks as we stroll along a path set between orchards with hanging green fruit. There may be more of the brick buildings in the distance.

"Tris. Short for Tristan."

"I'm Tobias. Short for Four. You like being a guard." It's not a question.

"I take my turn. Vigilance is like alcohol: healthy in moderation but dangerous when enjoyed too long and too well."

There are aphorisms like that painted on signs scattered throughout the grounds. _Peace is both the destination and the journey. You ARE a soul: you HAVE a body. Thank you for being you._

"So what do you like to do?" Tobias asks.

"Sewing. There's something so satisfying about seeing the fabric go whirrrp-whirrrp-whirrrp through the machine and turn into a thing. Sewing buttons by hand is even better though." Tristan keeps going, gesturing to indicate moves that mean little to me and less to Tobias. We learned about the Industrial Revolution in school, but Tobias wouldn't even know where clothing comes from.

"Of course, I can't stay on sewing detail all the time, as that'd be unhealthy, too," Tristan finishes. We're approaching one of the brick buildings, identical to the others in its row, surrounded by beds of herbs that turn the air savory. "I've got to do cooking for penance tonight because I was careless with the bread last month and let it burn."

A wave of humidity hits us as Tristan opens the wide doors. The dampness comes with a clean, sharp scent, more singing, and a metallic sound that gets louder as we reach the end of one side hall.

The next door opens onto so much _wetness_ and noise that I gasp for air. Tristan leads us through a maze of singing people and clanging machines and soap bubbles and flapping wet sheets to a tall person whose red head scarf sets off skin the same color as the rich soil in the fields. "Councilor Skyler, the visitors from Chicago."

"Hold this," the councilor says in a thin, low voice. Zhe hands each of us one corner of a sopping wet sheet. "We're going to fold it to put it through the mangle."

I have no idea what this means, nor does Tobias - and to my embarrassment, his hands are leaving gray spots on the fabric. Mine are, too. "I think we're doing more harm than good," I say.

The councilor looks at our smudges, then at Tristan, who bites zher lip. "They weren't taken to the fountain first?" the councilor says.

"It seemed urgent. . . I mean. . ." Tristan grimaces. "Oops. I'm sorry."

At the councilor's raised eyebrow and pursed lips, Tristan recites: "Self-discipline is the virtue of a civilized society."

"And?"

"Carelessness is a form of selfishness, for it says my convenience is worth more than others' good."

"And sorry is just a word if it isn't backed with action. Take this sheet to the boilers and wash it again."

To my relief, as my clothes are sticking to me in a way that makes me prickly with heat, the councilor leads us out of the laundry room. Zhe speaks cryptically into a box on the wall before pointing us to a patio with deep awnings and low tables.

We are to kneel at the tables, which I can tell hurts Tobias, but at least he does it. Young people appear with bowls of water and towels for washing our hands, then with pale red tea and tiny spicy cakes.

"Deanna brought me these cakes at the last winter holiday," Tobias says.

Councilor Skyler nods. "We trade them for the few things we can't make ourselves. Not to Chicago, though. Those cakes had passed through many hands before reaching you and had many stories to tell."

I'm not sure how direct the Children of Peace are about discussing business, but the sign behind the Councilor's head says _True politeness is consideration, false politeness is subterfuge._ "Do those hands include the Diligent in Madison?"

"They could. The Diligent have been disassembling old industrial sites, and the equipment is good to have."

"They must value your cakes a great deal."

"We make valuable cakes. Do you have friends in Madison?"

This is positively a case in which the polite answer would be subterfuge, but before I can frame a non-lie, a Child of Peace in a pale green tunic comes to dab at Tobias with goo from a jar.

"I _said_ I'm fine," Tobias snaps. I have a hand on his arm before he can swat at the medic.

"Hospitality is incomplete when the guest is uncomfortable," the councilor says. The medic's hair is dark, with gray streaks; zher olive face has lines, with a small scar pulling down the edge of one eye. Zhe kneels to scrutinize Tobias' face. I hope this is a check for signs of concussion.

"It'd be best for our work if you're healthy," I remind Tobias.

"I'm not five."

The councilor's expression reminds me of Evelyn's. "The adult knows the difference between self-sufficiency and defiance."

"Do you all speak in mottos?" Tobias grumbles. But he leans back on his heels and holds still while the medic attends to him.

"Only to children and strangers," the councilor says, surprising me with a chuckle. "Once a person understands the truths of humanity, we can speak as equals in our own words."

In one of those thoughts that grabs a fragment of accepted past, shakes it, and turns it mysterious, I wonder why, in my time of watching the Chicago experiment, I never heard them quote aphorisms at their new faction recruits.

"How friendly are you with the Diligent?" I ask the councilor.

"More than we were a year ago. Less than we'll be in a year. They work hard and trade honestly. They clasp the open hand of friendship."

"We've had a different experience in Chicago. They're threatening to overthrow the legitimate government."

"Is it a good government?"

Tobias glowers at me, rather than spitting out an answer. That's unexpected. Maybe he's learned manners, or maybe the little cakes have soothed him. He's eaten five, which is more than is really polite but hides my reluctance to take more than one.

"It's the government we chose. We try our best." I think of Evelyn, rubbing her face as she tries to decide whether it's better to kill a person or erase that person's memory. We have spies and theft and saboteurs. We have theft, now that Chicago has shops instead of the factions issuing supplies to their members. We have fraud, the more so because money is new to so many people.

Looking out across the fields of the Children of Peace, where golden afternoon sun slants across laughing children, where birds chirp in the trees and butterflies flitter to land on my sleeve, I could believe we've already failed at duct-taping together utopia.

"Maybe you should consider whether the Diligent would do better," Councilor Skyler says quietly.

xoxoxoxox

Our talk peters out in speculation about how the Diligent live, while Tobias slowly relaxes and even manages a split-lipped smile.

What the Children of Peace know is that the Diligent are hard-working and quiet. They break down old farm equipment from abandoned rural towns, some of it to trade, other parts for their own purposes.

There was a community in Madison before the Diligent formed, centered on the old university. They used to trade knowledge about medicine with the Children of Peace, but for the past year, the councilors have spoken only with Marcus.

"What is your father likely to have done with the old government?" I ask Tobias after dinner. It's a hearty stew of root vegetables and herbs, with fresh greens on the side and dense, warm bread. He seems comfortable at the long tables, like Dauntless in the old days. I don't know why, after the revolution, Chicago took up the Abnegation custom of eating in family units. Suddenly, I wish I did.

Tobias has taken three helpings, which justifies my decision to linger with the Children of Peace, and he's spent most of the meal in conversation with small, blond Tristan, which gives me real doubts about the wisdom of this visit. I've been comparing crops and industries with the Child of Peace seated to my left, an angular person introduced as Casey, dark-haired and narrow-faced, whose eagerness with questions that matches my own.

"Nothing," Tobias says. "People hand my father what he wants. It's always been that way."

Tristan leans zher head on Tobias' shoulder. I mop my bowl with a slice of bread, pushing down the fear that _right now_ the Diligent could be dosing Chicago with memory serum. Marcus needs people to remember the faction system if he wants to reinstate it.

"I'm sure your father is charismatic, but Jeanine Matthews seems to have been immune."

"Jeanine reacted to my father the same way she reacted to Tris. They both had something, this power over people. Jeanine wanted to take them apart and see how it worked."

"Who's Jeanine and why does she want to take me apart?" Tristan asks.

"Not you. Another Tris, a long time ago."

"There isn't another me. My last incarnation was as a grasshopper. What was yours?"

"A lion."

I have to ask, even if Tristan is joking. If it's possible to remember past lives, maybe it's possible to retrieve erased memories from this life. "How do you know what your past lives were?"

Tristan's pale blue eyes widen. "Don't you smoke the herbs? We do it on our eighteenth birthdays. That's how we get our past lives, to help us along. Only mine seem to have all been frivolous beings who can't remember the rules. My old nurturer says I'm being human this time to master self-discipline, but I'm going to be up human _forever_ at the rate I'm going."

"Is that good or bad?"

"Nothing is entirely good or entirely bad. It's what we make of it." Zhe gestures upwards and to the side, where that's one of the mottoes painted along the cornice, above murals of dancing and harvesting crops. Around us, people are collecting plates and re-filling wine glasses, an orderly dance of murmured _thank yous_. "This is my night for an hour of play before evening prayer. Do you want to play with me, Tobias?"

Tobias' acceptance stumbles over his cracked lips. I'd interpret the way his face distorts as a wink, except his eye's so swollen. _Play_ among the Children of Peace does not mean tossing around a ball or moving pebbles on a game board. The Bureau disapproved, but nobody at the Bureau remembers I exist.

Casey's been listening to our conversation with the same polite, casual attention that I cultivate when gathering information. Zhe smiles when our glances cross. "You know about Chicago, but are you from there or in the place that watches it?"

"Both. Chicago more recently, though. We aren't. . . as focused as the Bureau was on people getting married and having babies." I set my hand flat on the table, palm up. It's an invitation. Tobias doesn't need my supervision for a while, and it's my job to experience the world.

Zhe strokes a finger lightly along the lines of my palm. "What pleases you?"

Maybe the little cakes had more effect than I realized, as my answer leaves me feeling vulnerable. "To be remembered."

"The only other person who's said that to me was Diligent. Zhe said zhe'd been born two years ago. It was off-putting."

"It would please me to hear about that." _Not too much eagerness._

"There's not a lot to tell." Casey's touch becomes firmer, massaging tension from my hand. "Zhe came here with a trading party. Zhe was like one of us, except to remember only two years out of all possible lives. . . that's not an adult. I sent her to play card games with the children. Some of our guests prefer to do that."

There's a question mark in zher voice that implies it's time to state what I do or don't want. Being touched is soothing. Casey's skin is scented lightly with herbs I can't name. There's nobody in Chicago to feel betrayed. Zhe is probably hoping to pump me for further information about the city, just as I'd like to find out everything zhe knows about the Diligent, since zhe's talked to at least one.

"Play can mean whatever we want it to mean," zhe adds.

xoxoxoxox

Afterward, we sprawl together on Casey's bed in her tiny room, the breeze from the open window cooling our naked bodies as we doze. The walls and ceiling are painted in gigantic flowers as rosy and varied as our sated flesh. Our talk of nothing in particular is turning to the most recent visit from the Diligent when shouting echoes from lower in the building.

"Tobias," I say, suddenly, unwelcomely tense with anticipated fear and anger. "If there's trouble, he's in it."

"Zhe seemed happy to go with Tris."

The words I can pull from the shouting don't sound happy. _Liar. Seducer. I thought you were like her. How could you not tell me?_

The sharp sound that precedes the scream could be a stomp or a slap or even a book falling from a table. The raging shouted words that follow it. . .

Casey's breasts swing as zhe hands me clothing that I yank on and fasten askew, and I'm running toward the sound. Zhe's with me, belting zher tunic as we run, guiding me with touches and grunts along the brightly painted corridor, down stairs, along another corridor. . .

We're suddenly in a crowd, surging toward a door that lets light and rage into the hall. Tobias, wearing only his pants, is pounding with his fists at a small, blond, naked person who yelps and sobs with pain and fear. . .

And who is definitely, positively biologically male.

I don't bother with words, not when any minute someone's going to shoot Tobias, and he _deserves_ it. I tackle him at hip-level so he goes down hard, falling away from Tristan, and scramble with my elbows and knees out, to get my weight on top of Tobias so he can't go anywhere. If he's helpless, maybe he's safe long enough for me to think of something.

"Hold _still,_ " I hiss at him.

"He was supposed to be like Tris," Tobias says. It starts as a snarl, ends as a sob.

"And when zhe wasn't, you say _sorry, no thank you_ and walk away."

"We'd been kissing. I shouldn't have to ask if a girl is a girl."

Casey's voice cracks. "Humans are human first. All else is less than secondary." Zhe's holding Tristan, who's shaking all over now, crying into the shoulder of Casey's tunic. The room is half-painted, most of its design of birds just sketches. "When you attached so fast to Tris, we thought you understood what you were doing. If you'd given any hint you wanted a different playmate, anything at all-"

"I wouldn't have gone like this with anybody but Tris."

"Then you'd best have been treating Tris better," says a new voice behind me. The person who emerges from the crowd is broad-shouldered, short, fully dressed in guard uniform, and carrying a gun. "I'm going to have to ask you to move aside, honored guest, so we can take care of your friend. It's best you don't watch."

"You're going to shoot him," I say. My heart feels flat in my chest. I'm supposed to protect Tobias. I should have asked Tristan what biological gender zhe was. I've acted out of anger and carelessness since leaving the Leontari.

"It's the penalty."

Tobias squirms beneath me. "Not on the first offense. Not without a trial. I demand a trial."

"There's no doubt as to what you did."

My voice comes out level when I ask the obvious question. "Is execution usually the penalty on the first offense?"

"No," Casey says. "We wait for a pattern. Most people start small, so by the time they do something like this, _if_ they do something like this, there's a pattern established. We're on guard by then, too. If someone's slapped or hit before, hardly anyone will choose to be alone with zher."

Zhe shifts Tristan's weight across zher lap, then straightens zher tunic and pushes dark hair off zher narrow forehead. "Honestly, one of our own would have been put down before it got this far."

"Does Tristan get a choice in this?"

Tristan looks up, bruised, red-eyed, and baleful. I wish I hadn't asked that question. All the words that ought to come easy to me - _can you bear to have this person's death on your conscience? wouldn't you rather forgive?_ \- dissolve like salt in water. Making Tristan responsible for whether Tobias lives or dies means forgetting that _Tobias_ had the choice to not strike, not hit, not rage like a fool when he'd _promised_ there'd be no violence.

Gazing down at Tobias as he squirms under me - his lips are freshly raw, the black eye is shut, and this damaged face has become a stranger - I wonder if this is what he was like in Dauntless. If they all went off like this, how did they survive as a faction?

Others have assimilated with only minor incidents - a bar fight here, rough handling of a petty criminal there - and until now, I'd thought Tobias had adapted fine. During the brief time we'd dated - or, more often, when we'd gone out as a group with friends and colleagues like Christina - he'd been quiet but relaxed, the second or third to laugh at a joke but not the last.

I ease my weight off him. If I tell him to run for it, he'll decide he's not five and I'm not the boss of him.

So all I say, as I get to my feet and move back is: "He's yours. Shoot away."

Tobias is on his feet and diving before anyone armed reacts. He's diving toward the gun, _no, Tobias, that's the wrong direction._ The person holding the gun goes down under his momentum. The stray shot goes into the ceiling. _Why, why was the gun ready to fire when Tobias hadn't resisted yet?_ The shot could have hit any bystander. Any more punches and Tobias _will_ have brain damage.

There's a scrambling of bare feet in every direction, some to grab Tobias, some to run for help, a few to find a tunic and salves for Tristan.

Time runs out.

If his opponent hadn't kneed Tobias in the groin, my chances of getting a grip on his arm would have been next to zero. My hold is slippery from sweat and blood, and I have to rely on pressure and surprise to pull him past the people trying to pile on, as I'm _not_ going to kick and punch. We've done enough damage here.

Shoving Tobias out the open window gives me a shameful amount of satisfaction. It's only a story-and-a-half-drop: his Dauntless instincts take over to give him a safe landing. When I slide my leg over the sill, Casey is next to me.

"You're helping a criminal escape justice."

Zhe could stop me just by grasping my arm. I wouldn't hit zher, though I'm not sure zhe knows this.

"It's the good of the mission. I'm sorry."

I truly am. But it doesn't stop me, when I pull myself out of my roll across bruised beds of herbs, from grabbing Tobias' hand and running for the van. He yanks my arm sideways, to run in a zigzag pattern so shots are less likely to hit us, but I don't know if I'm hearing shots go wild or if my imagination has gone crazy.

There's nobody guarding the van, which is good. The guard detail must have run to help Tristan. No, there are three guards waiting at the gate. The sun's not even low enough to make them squint.

"Ram it at them," Tobias says as he digs under his seat for his gun.

"Not unless talking fails." Maybe not then. I don't want to hurt an innocent person over what Tobias did to Tristan. I also want very much to _not_ be dead, and I could be shot for helping a dangerous criminal escape.

I lower my window as a guard approaches, holding zher gun in a rest position. Tobias lifts his gun and cocks it.

The guard brings zher gun to level at Tobias' head. In a stand-off, we're outnumbered and dead. I am _not_ going to piss my pants in advance of being killed, but I'm clenching my thighs together to maintain reason and control.

"Are you taking that _thing_ away?" the guard asks.

"Yes." My voice squeaks. "I don't intend to bring him back here again."

Zhe nods. "The order is to let you pass."

Relief is so strong that my knees go weak, which is no _help_. It's my _job_ to drive the van slowly through the gates, which means I have to make my feet work the pedals.

The guard has one more thing to say. "I'm also supposed to tell you that the Children of Peace will _never_ forget a night like this."

 _It pleases me to be remembered._ It was Casey's word that saved us.

What I feel most strongly, as we accelerate past the hoary trees and ruined houses of Beloit, is shame. Casey did nothing but good to me, while I brought violence into zher home, and zhe saved me anyway.

I don't know whether this means zhe has a job like mine, full of compromises to protect the community, or whether she's simply too kind to do hurt if she can avoid it.

"Tris was perfect, until. . . that. I'm not gay." Tobias is slumped in his seat, cradling the gun in his lap.

"There are possible responses between continuing to make out and what you did." There's enough sunlight left to get us to Janesville, then I have to decide if we can make Madison on battery power, or if we're stopping for the night.

Janesville has places where a stranger can stay. I'm not going to be able to save Tobias if he gets in trouble there, though.


	4. Chapter 4

_**A/N:** Four and the backstory of his city are the property of Veronica Roth. __**Trigger warning:** Serums play a large role in the plot, with the resulting loss of autonomy to people dosed with them. There is also physical and psychological horror._

* * *

"Why are we stopping?" Tobias asks as I pull the van into a driveway under a sign that reads _Super 8._ He's been quiet for a very long time, except for monosyllabic answers to questions I ask mostly to make sure he's still conscious.

"I don't want to get to Madison in the middle of the night. We don't know what it's like there."

I feel as if ebbing adrenalin has taken my blood with it, leaving me limp, pale, and so weary that keeping the van straight on the highway is an effort. But I've belonged to Chicago long enough to know not to show weakness to former Dauntless, any more than I'd doubt the word of a former Candor.

"This'd better not be about my health," he says.

"It's about not knowing what's in Madison." In the half-full parking lot, we're the only solar-powered vehicle. Most of the others must run on vegetable oil, but there are two pedal-powered wagons and at least one that has shafts for attaching a horse or cow.

"Brave people deal with danger by running toward it."

"We're going to do that. In the morning."

Inside the office, we wait at the counter for the clerk to finish whatever he's doing in a back room. I expect Tobias to ask what this place is and why there are so many vehicles here when we haven't seen many on the road, but all he does is pace, pounding one fist against a thigh. The bruises on his back make it look as if his tattoos have smeared.

"How many rooms?" the clerk asks. He's no taller than my shoulder, but burly and bearded, with tattoos framing each cheek.

"One. One room, one night." I've come prepared with various forms of money, so paying in advance isn't a problem.

Tobias stares as I hand over pink and blue bills. "Why aren't you paying him in chips?"

"We'll save those for when we're in Chicago." It's possible the clerk will look at our van and know we're from Chicago, but it'd be simpler if he didn't.

When the clerk taps his finger against the blank space on the register, where I haven't filled in our city of origin, I scan it to make sure nobody here is likely to betray us with awkward questions, then scribble _Rosemount_ as illegibly as I can.

Tobias doesn't know how to work old-fashioned metal keys, so I escort him down a corridor of patchwork carpet to our room, open the bathroom door in a way that I hope plants hints, and then go to park the van properly and bring in our travel bags. If I'd planned to stay more than a few hours with the Children of Peace, or if I'd gone for our luggage when our welcome lengthened, we'd have fewer comforts now.

When I get back to the room, the bathroom door is closed and the shower is running. I open it far enough to drop Tobias' bag on the floor because we're no longer on terms where I want to see him naked, then let myself fall onto the bed nearer the door. There's a television and a remote control, though it's anyone's guess what, if any, programming will be available out here.

Static.

Static.

A doughy young man with hair absurdly like this year's styles, but dressed in the manner of more than a century ago, singing a song from those olden times. An older man with bristle-cut hair tells him it almost worked.

Static.

Static.

Static.

The familiar bum-bim theme song of _Law and Order: Bureau of Genetic Welfare._ But I've seen this episode - and anyway, it makes me want my foster-mother with a pang that's almost nausea.

Static.

Saint Paul. The brown stone tower facing the public square is unmistakable. The images jump, accelerate, jump again. This is surveillance tape, I can't tell how old. Someone has edited in dialog and commentary that might be intended to be funny.

Static.

Static.

Marcus Eaton.

He's standing on steps in front of a pillared building, speaking with a sort of rough enthusiasm about something to do with food. His hair has all gone white and is pulled back in a queue, but he still dresses in an approximation of Abnegation styles.

The shower noise stops, and my thumb switches Marcus off so quickly that my brain is left wondering if I did the right thing. There's information here, but I don't know how Tobias will react. _I don't want to have to subdue him, not after all the damage he's taken_ is what I tell myself, but there's a part of my brain that sees Tristan, hunched and sobbing, and wants very much for that not to be me.

In the next instant, I slide the van control from my pocket to the inside of my pillow case.

When Tobias emerges from the bathroom, damp but covered by a long, loose shirt, I grab my bag and scurry into the bathroom. The shower is scuffed and stained, with cracked tile and chipped faucets, but there's still hot water to wash away my tension, along with my last reserves of energy. I'm not even fully dry when I fumble on a sleeping shirt, pour myself a glass of water, and stumble back to my bed.

Tobias' voice wakes me just as my body is forgetting scratchy sheets and stiff mattress. "Dauntless don't run away from a fight."

"I'm not Dauntless."

"You would have chosen us, though. Wouldn't you?"

If I say _yes,_ maybe he'll go to sleep. But he'll wake up with expectations that I can't meet, and that'll make tomorrow worse.

"The interns who watched the cameras. . . we used to try to imagine what we'd choose. Most of the scientists' kids chose Erudite."

"But you didn't want to slave over a microscope. You wanted real life."

"What I wanted before Tris changed everything doesn't really matter." Nobody remembers that I was supposed to have advanced training in how to study outside cultures. I recall telling Tobias about it, over a dinner with Evelyn during the brief period that he and I dated, but he's already forgotten.

I was supposed to learn the right way, the reliable way, to handle all the strange things I deal with now. I was supposed to study these phenomena from the safety of the Bureau, watching things happen to other people, not bundled under the covers in a motel in bandit territory, with stray tendrils of thought seeking escape in imagining Casey stroking my back.

"You were watching. Why did you let Erudite enslave us and wipe out Abnegation?" His voice cracks on _enslave._

I don't think _you_ means me in particular, and I wonder why he hasn't asked this question before, or if he did, what answer he got.

"My foster-mother. . . a number of scientists wanted to intervene. David said that was bad science." She stood behind me at the screens, watching, saying _this is what happens when science isn't constrained by compassion._

Tobias doesn't ask the next obvious question, but I answer it anyway. "David wanted to make sure Jeanine's mind-control serum worked. If it did, he had the answer to controlling people in the experimental cities. He would have been a hero."

"He told us all the serums were invented by the Bureau."

Tobias' pain is something I can't roll myself in blankets and burrow away from, so I sit up and sip my lukewarm water. "Technically, yes. The Bureau held the patents for anything invented in the experiments. Jeanine was. . . incredibly naïve about scientific method, but she had an IQ in the top one-eighth of one percent of the population. David said she mostly made mistakes, but most of her mistakes were interesting."

"If she was allied with the Bureau, why was she so terrified about people finding out about them?"

"I don't know." A line of glaring white light falls through the crack in the curtains, setting a stripe across Tobias' face. "I was only an intern. I heard things, but there was a lot that we weren't supposed to understand yet." _And now, there's nobody to remember it and tell me._

I watch the unmoving light in silence long enough to wonder if a headache is going to follow me into sleep, before Tobias speaks again.

"I could have stopped it, if I'd acted faster. The killing of the Abnegation, I mean. Tris told me about the serum hours before anything happened."

"You couldn't have known."

"I worked with the people who were secretly collaborating with Jeanine." His voice is low and matter-of-fact. "I had all the pieces. I just. . . with the Abnegation gone, there'd be no one left who remembered who I was before I became Four. I told myself this was just like the fear simulation, where I had to shoot the woman just _because,_ with no concern about whether she was innocent. Pull the trigger and I'd be free of that fear."

"I'm sorry." It's an automatic lie. I want to demand how he could wipe out people who _remembered_ him, but listening to the answer would require energy I don't have.

"The thing is, I was free of it for years. I didn't start having nightmares until Cassandra died."

My exhausted brain has to fumble for who Cassandra is, even though I knew her, even though I'm the one who uncovered her connection to the Diligent. She's the small, feisty blond girlfriend before Deanna, the one who cheated on Tobias and turned up dead in the river.

She deserves to be remembered for more than that. She was quieter than Deanna. She came to Chicago as an immigrant from the Fringe, she said, but really from out here. She taught a form of unarmed combat that the Dauntless didn't know.

"Did you kill her?" I ask. Then I want to slap my hand over my own mouth for the rudeness of it.

I also wish Tobias would say _no_ faster. Chicago never had medical examiners or detectives. People just died because sometimes that happens, so nobody investigated Cassandra's death. I believe she was killed by another Diligent agent for failing at her mission, but I didn't know how to prove anything from her water-logged corpse.

"I thought you knew." He rearranges his hands under his head. "I ran into her one night. We had an argument. It got rough. Tris used to say that in Dauntless, we did dangerous things and people got killed, and then we went on and did the next dangerous thing."

 _You thought I was contentedly dating you while I knew you'd killed your last girlfriend._

Covering my face with my hands, or even turning away, would be the stupidest thing I could do, the thing that might actually endanger me. I'm safe as long as Tobias believes I accept his violence as totally ordinary, just one more thing in the course of a Dauntless day.

 _Your girlfriends are always agents of the Diligent,_ I want to say. But if I tell him that about Cassandra, I'm somehow condoning what he did. All I'd wanted to do was neutralize her influence on Tobias, set back her plans, force her to go to her contacts for more instructions, so that I could identify them, too. She wasn't supposed to die.

If the woman inhabiting the body of my foster-mother was right about the effects of the memory serum, I killed Deanna, even though I left her body intact.

If Evelyn was right, Deanna's soul was intact, and her new personality was still her.

Either way, what I'd done was my _job._ It was part of protecting the fragile existence of Chicago. It wasn't the same as killing in a fit of rage.

"Maybe you're right," I say. "Maybe I would have been Dauntless."

xoxoxoxox

I wake to a dim, silent room where the slash of light across Tobias' empty bed has the clarity of sunshine.

My childhood training at sleeping through gunfire and chaos is not an advantage on a trip like this. The bedspread is rough and slightly sticky under my hands as I push myself upright in bed.

 _Think._ Tobias is not in the room. There's enough light to see that his bag is open, with his sleep shirt thrown on top of it. His shoes, of a size for tripping over, are not in sight. Unless he moved them to the other side of his bed and then went barefoot, he got dressed and went out, with the intention of going somewhere.

When I slide a hand under into my pillow case, the control for our van is still there. My heart may belatedly pound in misplaced panic, but he _didn't_ intend to take the van and go to his father on his own.

He isn't wandering in a daze from a concussion if he thought to get fully dressed and put his shoes on. So he went somewhere for a reason.

If his father called him. . . would I have slept through that? There's no way to know, but there's also no evidence it would leave. If Tobias left a note for me, it'd be here on the nightstand. . . or on the bathroom counter when I go to splash my face.

I turn on the lights and walk a brisk circuit of the room, checking every surface, opening empty drawers for no clear reason but thoroughness. The memory serum is locked in the van, so he didn't want that.

He probably thinks there'll be some dining hall serving breakfast, like in old Dauntless.

My wallet is still in my pants pocket, looking untouched, so he didn't take local money.

Pulling on my clothes takes two minutes. Re-packing our overnight bags takes another three, but I'm not losing them here if we have to make another run away from trouble. They slow me down, but I'm not counting on speed at this point.

I even pause at the counter in the lobby to hand in my key and ask the day clerk - a long, tall woman with a beaky nose and a plaid kerchief - if she happened to see where Tobias went. Unfortunately, her only answer is "out."

 _Out_ is a wasteland of asphalt and scrubby grass under a flat blue sky. Ten steps out toward the road, my shoulders are itching for a wall to press against.

There are not enough buildings. The ones that exist are too far away for walking, not under this merciless emptiness.

The breeze, just on the edge of chill, brings me the faint sour funk of a corn-oil filling station. Yes. To my left, there's a little blocky building with a sheltered array of pump stations and a big sign that shows dancing ears of corn. The drivers of two motley cars are discussing something with much waving of arms.

The third car is without its driver, so this could be one of the filling stations that sells food and drink to travelers. Tobias wouldn't know that, though, and he's never shown any special interest in cars.

I walk around the motel because I have no better ideas, but the only things on the far side are another, dingier motel and a little mansard-roof building. This building's sign shows a person with a snout and floppy ears, driving a car with ears blowing in the breeze.

Inside the mansard building, Tobias is sprawled in the third booth from the door, with a massive plate of pancakes, bacon, and eggs in front of him. He's facing me, so I can see only the back of the person talking to him.

Long pale braids, ornamented with beads, likely mean a young man in his late teens, coming from Minneapolis or one of its sister cities. _Likely_. I don't know all the permutations of culture out here. I don't know how many allies Minneapolis has these days, or if one of them is Madison and Marcus Eaton.

My stomach rumbles. If Tobias wants secrecy, this isn't the place for it. I dodge the extended leg of a man who looks halfway to being a bear, then slide into the booth next to Tobias' companion, dropping our overnight bags at my feet. "Good morning," I say brightly.

The stranger speaks before Tobias does. "You must be Paloma. I'm Gretchen. Do you have a child with him yet?"

"No." It sounds short, but I'm not sure of the polite phrasing or what will shock a woman from Minneapolis, especially when everything I know says she shouldn't be traveling at all. Respectable Minneapolis women run the city. It's the men who move around all the places that the Bureau treats as empty.

I nod to a waitress whose head is shaven except for a shock of red hair that stands straight up, and she comes to pour peppermint tea for me. I order pancakes, eggs, and fried onions, fiddling with the silverware so my distraction covers sneaking a look at Gretchen's wrists.

She's wearing long sleeves, so I can't see if she has the compass-rose tattoo that Minneapolis uses to mark its criminals. She _doesn't_ have the two or three wedding rings she ought to wear if she's in her early twenties like us. I don't believe she's a never-married sixteen-year-old: her face may be round and freckled and open, but her features are too definite to belong to a teenager.

Gretchen looks like Tris, of course. They all do. Tobias is a magnet for small, feisty blondes. "Were you interested in capturing him?" I ask.

She grins. His face is so battered that his smirk looks more like a sneer. "Maybe," she says. "I've been getting to know him."

"She's been telling me about life out here."

I brace myself for the inevitable _you didn't tell me_ accusation. "It's complicated, isn't it?"

"They have so many factions and so many different ways to hate each other."

"That could change," Gretchen says. She slides a hand across the table, angling around Tobias' plate. "We could be part of that change."

Tobias' fingers slide toward her. I'm wondering how I'm going to get him out of trouble this time when his fist closes around her wrist and he yanks her toward him with one hand while pressing a table knife to her throat with the other.

She doesn't scream. Her only struggle is to reach back her free hand, and I've got a grip on her before my mind has articulated the memory that _they all carry guns in Minneapolis, oh shit._

The sudden acrid smell of urine tells me she's terrified now, if she wasn't a minute ago.

She still doesn't scream. If she screamed, we'd have to run for it.

"My father sent you," Tobias snaps. "We'll get along a lot better if you admit it."

It takes her three gulps to get the words out. The waitress drops off my plate with a shrug, so maybe this is commonplace in Janesville, but if we weren't the wronged parties - there are bad reasons to have a knife to a young woman's throat. I saw them on video in the Fringe, but even out there, people _cared_ what happened and might try to stop it. I almost want Gretchen to scream, just for proof that someone would help her.

"Get her weapon," Tobias tells me. It's an order he has no right to give me, but it's also good sense. Reaching around her with my free hand is awkward and seems to take forever, but still nobody cares.

I hold the gun on Gretchen while he slowly releases her. She slides back into her seat and rests her head in her hands. When Tobias holds out a hand, I give him the pistol. My hands are shaking when I pick up the fork, and though my stomach's empty, my throat closes against the first bite of pancake.

"How did you know?" I ask because _I didn't think you'd figure it out_ would be unspeakably rude, as well as unfair, since he'd obviously done so with less evidence than I had.

"A girl who looks like Tris throws herself at me. I don't believe in that any more."

"They told me Minneapolis women were aggressive," Gretchen whimpers. "They said it was the perfect cover."

"You aren't really from Minneapolis?" I ask her.

She shakes her head. "I don't know. I've seen it on video."

"What were you supposed to do?"

"Distract Tobias." The whites show all around her irises. "Kill you. Or lose you. It didn't matter. My job was to bring Tobias over to Marcus' side."

Relief at not being dead opens my throat. The pancake is fluffy and buttery, and after roiling hesitation, my stomach decides eating will work.

"What do you expect us to do with you?" I ask Gretchen.

"Let me go? All I can do is go back to Marcus. I can't hurt you."

It's a comforting solution, but it raises an obvious question. "What happens when you go back to Madison?"

"Marcus will give me the elixir that takes away all sins, and I will be reborn in a purer form."

 _Memory serum._ It has to be.


	5. Chapter 5

_**A/N:** Four, Marcus, and their backstory are the property of Veronica Roth. __**Trigger warning:** Serums play a large role in the plot, with the resulting loss of autonomy to people dosed with them. There is also physical and psychological horror._

* * *

"Cows," Gretchen says before I can answer Tobias' question about the staring animals grazing beside I-90. Her voice shakes. So do my hands on the steering wheel of the van.

"Are you related to them?" Tobias' eye has swollen shut around a purple bruise. The Amity raised only goats.

"No."

There's supposed to be a cow-gene town somewhere south of all this, out on the broad plains, but this isn't the time to tell Tobias. He's edgy enough, kneeling on the passenger seat so he can keep Gretchen's gun trained on her, as she huddles on the bench behind us. Last time I glanced in the rear view mirror, her knees were drawn up to her chin as she tried to hide herself in her cascade of beaded braids.

Tobias wanted us to take her vegetable-oil-powered truck, but there's no one in bandit territory that I'd trust to store a Chicago van.

"How did you know where to find Tobias?" I ask Gretchen.

"The Children of Peace. Radio. There were two messages. After the second one, Marcus sent me to Janesville."

One message around the time we talked with Councilor Skyler, saying we were guests in Beloit. Then a second message after we fled. It was dark and late. Marcus, remembering the solar-powered cars of the Erudite, would have expected us to stop in Janesville.

"You didn't learn how to be from Minneapolis in a day."

The soft rattling, barely audible over the engine, is Gretchen's beads as she shakes her head. "Ten months. Marcus thought Deanna might fail. I was next. I do love you, Tobias."

When his silence makes me glance sideways, his face is darker and more contorted than the damage from fist-fights explains.

"Don't say that word. Not when you come from my father."

"Is Deanna okay?"

"Yes," I say before Tobias can answer. In Gretchen's world, Deanna's fine. She's been reborn in purer form. "What faction are you?"

In the long silence before she answers, well-tended fields slide by outside: leafy dark-green shrubs in orderly ranks, then lighter-green rows of something spiky, then a field blanketed with green from end to end, the tendrils of vines crossing the irrigation ditch to reach toward the road. _Squash,_ my memory supplies.

Old Chicago believed the Amity grew all of its food, but that was impossible. The Bureau used Amity to experiment with old seeds, from before hybridization and genetic modification made crops more reliable, but also more likely to be wiped out by a single virus.

Most of the city's food came from farming collectives that eked out some sort of truce with the surrounding bandits. Further south, beyond the cow people, even, there were rumored to be farms surrounded with barbed wire and gun turrets, where the workers were never allowed to leave or rest.

A watch tower flashes past, the wooden hut balanced on legs that flash metallic in the sun. At this speed, I'm imagining the glint of a gun muzzle through the hut's window, but it's probably there. There'll be a signal to bring more armed people running at the first sign of bandits.

We've passed only two big cargo trucks, a tractor, and a farm wagon. The signal is probably also being used to tell Madison about us.

"None," Gretchen says, and I have to rustle through my memory to realize what question she's answering.

"You don't have a faction?"

Tobias growls. "She's Erudite." _Because she's lying,_ my brain fills in. Other factions _could_ lie, except for Candor, but Erudite had the reputation for enjoying it.

"I'm not." Gretchen whimpers. "I don't want to be. I don't have a faction. I'm not worthy."

"Factionless." Tobias spits the word so hard it must hurt his split lip.

"Until I'm worthy. I thought. . . I was supposed to earn the choosing by bringing you to Marcus without _her._ "

We pry it out of her, sentence by sentence, as the fields resolve into little frame houses with peaked roofs. The Diligent don't choose their factions at sixteen or so, the way old Chicago did. Membership in a faction is earned, by deeds. It takes a year without being reborn to be eligible.

"I don't know," Gretchen says again and again. Asking a different way, and then a third way, gets me the same answers. She's not a trained spy who's holding out on me. She's an adult with the knowledge of a small child.

"A lot. The most, I think. Or maybe Amity." That's her answer to the number of Abnegation. No more Candor than she can count on the fingers of one hand. More Dauntless than that, but fewer than Abnegation.

"I want to be Dauntless." That answer makes Tobias growl again. She knows nothing about a choosing serum. She's seen the ceremony twice: a handful of people stand in front of the community and choose.

"No knife?" Tobias asks. I can hear the shaking of her beads. No knife, no bowls. Amity kiss the new initiates' cheeks in welcome. Dauntless slaps them. Abnegation washes their feet.

Gretchen's never seen a Candor welcome, and of Erudite, she won't speak at all.

xoxoxoxox

She knows enough to guide us through the roads that wrap around lakes and wind between tall buildings of pale pink stone. The town of Madison has burnt-out gaps and neighborhoods where houses are given over to chickens and cows, but the old university campus is as alive with people as downtown Chicago.

We're soon surrounded by pedal-carts and pedestrians, and then it doesn't matter if Gretchen knows her way because we have to move with the flow of traffic. They know who we are. They must. The crowd is too dense, too directed. No one touches the van, but they don't have to. Even if I thought I had a chance against so many, I wouldn't run anybody down in a futile show of resistance.

The crowd reaches immovable density in front of the building with tall white pillars, the same one I saw on television last night. At the top of its steps, a man in gray robes is addressing the crowd. I don't need Tobias' hiss of breath, or the visible tightening of his shoulders, to know it's Marcus.

"We're going to get out slowly," I say before Tobias can react. I don't want him charging the crowd. I don't want us hauled in front of Marcus as prisoners, either. "We're here to negotiate."

He reaches over his seat to haul Gretchen forward. She lands in his lap in a tangle of legs and collar and beaded braids that he sorts somehow into shoving her in front of him as he opens the car door and steps out into the crowd. He has her own gun pressed to her temple.

This doesn't say _we come in peace,_ but Marcus smiles and spreads his arms. "Behold, good people! My son is returned to me!"

In the instant before Tobias reacts, I slide across his seat and onto the ground to stand beside him. Getting separated might be safer for me than being in the wake of whatever trouble Tobias unleashes on us, but he's still my responsibility.

Before we left Janesville, I shoved some of the memory serum vials into my pockets, surrounded by handfuls of junk that I hope will distract anybody who searches us. Under the eyes of Madison, I feel like the serum must be glowing green through my clothes, but it's Tobias they're looking at. I might as well be invisible.

"I could kill her right here," Tobias announces.

"Be my guest." Marcus' smile widens. "I gave her to you to do exactly as you like."

A chill at the bottom of my spine paralyzes me. I won't allow that. I shove the van door shut with my shoulder and thumb the remote to lock it. If the Diligent want to move it, that's their problem.

Gretchen is trembling in Tobias' grip. The crowd is quiet enough that I can hear her murmur of prayer: not for her life or for mercy, but in the old Abnegation way, of begging some god to do his will with her.

I angle so that my mouth is behind Tobias' ear, so that he can't say he didn't hear me. "Dauntless run _toward_ danger."

When he lets her go, she dashes into the crowd and is lost to my eye. Tobias hands me her gun and walks forward, hands raised. A path opens in front of him, though I have to match him step for step to prevent it from separating us.

The smell is what makes my stomach churn, though it's not unpleasant and it's not the marijuana-and-filth fug of the old Fringe. It's herbs and lye soap and pine and smoke and the tang of sweat that's dried outdoors more than once. It's _foreign. . ._

No. It's not foreign.

It's Saint Paul _._ Our neighbors smelled like this. My parents. . . sitting on my mother's lap, my face buried in her shirt. . . They dressed like this, too, in multi-colored clothing saved from the burning of the world.

I focus my eyes on the handful of people in faction garb - two women in Dauntless black, a man whose yellow-and-red vest over a red shirt screams _Amity_ \- to pin my mind to the here-and-now. An angular-featured, olive-skinned woman reminds me for a moment of Evelyn. . . _think of Evelyn, sitting in her office, trying to protect Chicago._ Evelyn remembers me.

Evelyn remembered me the day before yesterday. I don't know what's happened in Chicago since.

We reach the bottom of the steps and Tobias starts the upward climb. _Height makes you a target,_ I want to say, but Tobias is Dauntless and he won't care.

He doesn't care, either, when Marcus reaches out to embrace him. He doesn't _look_ for a dagger hidden in a sleeve. Tobias walks into his father's arms and hugs him as if all the years of beatings and betrayal were erased by that one thrashing at Candor, back during the war.

xoxoxoxox

"It was your mother who showed me the value of the factionless," Marcus says.

Tobias lounges in a deep chair by the empty fireplace. His lower lip juts out in a way I'd ordinarily interpret as sullen, but he may just be easing the ache of where it's scabbed.

Marcus' quarters are airy, and his sofa is soft, but the bare floor beneath my boots and the lack of a pillow for the small of my back reminds me that he's Abnegation. The white walls have the brightness of recent paint, the tall windows are uncurtained, and the mantle is bare of anything personal.

"We were taught that everybody has to be in a faction, but experience showed us that factions are for the elite. The ordinary jobs of the city can as well be done by the factionless. The trick is to make sure they never want to rebel."

"Like my mother did."

"How?" I ask.

Marcus cool gazes pins me like a specimen. "Were you Erudite?"

"No." It's his job to know my background, not mine to reveal it. "How do you make sure the factionless don't rebel?"

"I keep them comfortable. No huddling in abandoned buildings, wearing rags and eating out of cans. They have a decent living and festivals four times a year. And I gave them something to aspire to."

"Joining a faction."

"Being _invited_ into a faction. We were fools to allow sixteen-year-olds to choose whatever faction they liked. It cheapened the factions and let the wrong sorts take over."

"Like you," Tobias says.

Marcus chuckles, but whatever he means to say is interrupted by a woman carrying a tray, followed by a small boy. She's tall, angular, with olive skin and dark, curly hair pulled back with a spangled scarf at odds with her plain gray dress. The boy runs to Marcus and climbs in his lap.

"My second son. Quentin, meet your older brother Tobias."

"Five fears?" I ask when Tobias doesn't speak. I expect him to be staring at the boy who looks so much like he must have looked at age three, but no, his gaze is set on the woman.

 _Abnegation,_ I remind myself. Tobias rarely saw a mirror. He doesn't know what he looked like, but he knows what his mother looked like. Quentin's mother looks like a younger Evelyn, her face unlined but still with Tobias' jutting lower lip.

Marcus chuckles again. The woman kneels at his feet and pours peppermint-scented tea for us. "Five gifts. Like his father. Tobias always believed I was disappointed in him for being Divergent, but no matter what I did, he _wasn't_. Not even as much as that hell-raiser girlfriend of his who tested for three factions. I tested positive for all five."

"Thank you for your hospitality," I say to the woman. If she's Abnegation in the old ways, showing gratitude and concern is good manners. "I'm Paloma. May I know your name?"

"Ak-"

"Wrong question," Marcus interrupts. "You're supposed to ask me why I chose Abnegation."

"You'll tell me that anyway." I don't dare sip the tea, not even after he does. With five positives, he could be immune to anything, even the death serum. "I want to know her name."

"I stayed with Abnegation because nobody would expect someone who supposedly has the power to destroy the world to choose that. There's nothing in the tea."

The way he looks straight into my eyes, unblinking, I know he's lying, but not if the lie is about his motivations, the tea, or both.

"Don't drink," I tell Tobias. "It probably has memory serum in it."

"It doesn't," Marcus says, and this time he blinks normally. "It's tea. Her name is Akallabeth."

"I am unworthy," Akallabeth murmurs. She keeps her eyes lowered and her hands clasped loosely in her lap.

The warmth of the tea can't soften the chill in my stomach. We scientists' children used to make a game of imitating the Abnegations' endless mutual courtesies, mocking one another with politeness until our parents threatened punishment if we could not just _decide_ who was going first through a door. . . but I never heard an Abnegation call herself _unworthy._ For all their soft-spoken solicitude, they had no qualms about running the city's government.

"You wanted to run Chicago," I say to Marcus.

"I did run Chicago. I could have dealt with Jeanine if I hadn't made two mistakes. One was not realizing your mother was in the city, Tobias."

"Are you sure you tested Erudite?" Tobias says.

"You knew Evelyn's death was faked." I take another sip of tea. "You thought she'd been smuggled out of the city to the Bureau."

"Yes. I was just as glad to have her gone. She was defiant." He rests a hand on Akallabeth's dark curls. Quentin slides down from his lap and toddles over to look up at Tobias, whose cracked and blackened grin seems not to scare him.

"What was the other?"

"I didn't recognize that Natalie Prior came from outside the city until it was too late. After Beatrice and Caleb both chose other factions, I suggested she and Andrew have another child. She'd married the same year she chose Abnegation, so she should have been barely into her thirties with plenty of time to try again. She said no."

Tobias grunted. "Maybe she thought Tris wasn't replaceable."

"Unlike you?" Marcus shakes his head as Tobias winces. "She said she couldn't. I knew the right people to get a look at old Dauntless security videos. There was no sign of Natalie before age twelve. She didn't exist. Then in the years before choosing, she never shot up in height or even seemed to change. I think she must have been at least eighteen when she came to Chicago, perhaps older than that."

"That's a major leap to a conclusion," I point out.

"It doesn't matter how big the leap, when it lands in the right spot. If Natalie Prior hadn't been determined to reveal the presence of the Bureau, Jeanine would never have tried to kill the Abnegation. I could have out-smarted her."

"How many people were spying on Dauntless?" Tobias asks.

Marcus laughs. "Basically everyone, my idealistic son. We all watched one another, all the time, and the Bureau watched us. They never guessed that my plan was to raise an army of Divergents that would leave the city and take them over."

"Then Natalie Prior. . ."

"Set off Jeanine to wipe out the Divergent. If she'd just _shut up_ ,in another five years, it wouldn't have mattered. Jeanine would have been dead and we'd have rejoined the world on our own terms."

"Then why go back to the faction system now?" My tea cup clatters against the tray. I've lived five years among the people who wiped out my foster-home. Confronting one man who wanted to do the same thing _and didn't_ should be nothing.

"In my old age, dear Paloma, I've learned the value of tending my own garden. The world outside Chicago is a disorderly place." His eyes are wide and sincere again. "Back then, I had ideals. The Bureau had lied to us, and I wanted to set that right."

"I thought only Jeanine had contact with the Bureau." My gaze strays from Marcus to Tobias, who's letting Quentin play with some sort of star-shaped thing. _Don't touch the edges,_ I hear Tobias murmur. My hands itch to snatch his brother away before the child loses a finger, but Marcus seems unconcerned.

"She did. I realized on my own that the choosing test was a lie. Think about it, Paloma, if you can. We're given a test to determine our best faction, and then we're allowed to make choices contrary to the test."

"Free will," Tobias says without looking up.

"By that logic, every person who tests as a Candor but decides they like Amity better should be considered Divergent. When I dropped hints about that, I was treated as if that was the craziest thing on earth. We're all tested, but we don't have to follow the test. So _logically,_ the test is testing for something else. You know what it is, Paloma, but I didn't, not at first."

"The healed genetic pattern." I say it automatically, as I was taught.

"The trail of the serum led back to Erudite, and there were too many questions nobody could answer. Once I realized the answers had to be outside the wall, it was easy enough to follow."

"Why the Allegiant, then?" I ask.

Tobias snorts. "Because my mother was on the other side."

"Because I was the _leader_ of Chicago. I was going to approach the Bureau on _my_ terms, not something dictated by the agenda of one Prior or another. We needed a strong negotiating position, not to go to the Bureau on bended knee, begging for help. They took Divergents from among us so we wouldn't breed together, and I wanted to know why."

xoxoxoxox

"Your mother's Divergent, too," I tell Tobias when we're alone in our room. It's bare, echoing, and high in a pink-stone tower, but it has two beds and its own bathroom, which is all I care about.

"My mother was factionless." He paces in his socks. "If Evelyn's Divergent, why did I test for only one faction?"

"Something went wrong. It doesn't breed the way the Bureau thought. You were immune to Jeanine's mind-control serum."

 _And you fit in far too well with Dauntless,_ I want to add.

"Why are you so sure?"

"Your father thought she'd been smuggled out of the city. That's what he knew happened with Divergents. She left you behind, so you logically weren't worth saving, which meant you weren't Divergent."

"Thank you."

"I'm sorry." That's truth. Only in Dauntless was Tobias valued for himself, not as somebody's son or somebody's pawn. I hold out a hand, not sure what I intend him to do, but he ignores me to gaze out the window into the trees.

The rest of our talk with Marcus was his boasting about the Diligent. Gretchen's guesses were more or less right. There were four dozen each of the Amity and Abnegation, three dozen Dauntless, and maybe six Candor. Every time I asked a question about the Erudite, he turned it away.

"How do you feel about having a brother?" I ask Tobias.

"I wish you had those old Bureau scanners and could tell me if he's broken or not."

"You're sure you're not Candor?"

"I wanted to be honest and brave and selfless and smart and kind." He pounds his fist against the window frame. "I live with my mom, work a government job that bores me, and every girl who says she loves me is doomed or lying."

 _Including the one you killed._ I wish I hadn't reached out for him. I'm glad he ignored it. His pain doesn't excuse what he did to Cassandra. She could have been returned here, safely. Marcus might have wiped her memory, the way I did with Deanna, but at least she'd have some chance.

"And my father wants me to be the general of my younger brother's army of conquest. What's to stop me from breaking the brat's neck?"

"Human decency?" My hands clench in my lap. I open the fingers one by one.

"I have lion genes, remember? Except I don't. All I ever tested was Abnegation. My father - and my mother, if I believe you - had all the gifts, and somehow I got worm genes."

"I'm going for a walk," I say because I'm out of sympathetic answers.

"Why?"

"Fresh air. And I want to know what happened to Erudite."


	6. Chapter 6

_**A/N:** The backstory of Chicago, Four, and Marcus belong to Veronica Roth. __**Trigger warning:** Serums play a large role in the plot, with the resulting loss of autonomy to people dosed with them. There is also physical and psychological horror._

* * *

Erudite will be found in three places: where there are laboratories, where there are computers, and where there are books.

I know enough of the meaning of _university_ to realize there'll be many labs scattered across the sprawling campus, with no way to guess which ones the Diligent have taken over. The same problem applies to computers. But books used to be gathered in _libraries,_ and there are only a few of those. A standing map sign, repainted over many layers of faded marks, promises a library within a few minutes' walk.

The Diligent don't dawdle. Matching their stride along the tree-lined street leave me no time to look closely at the buildings. But my heart jumps a little at the site of brown, rough stone arranged in towers and arches. My parents took me here when I was seven, only it wasn't _here_.

At the corner of the white, pillared building where Marcus greeted us, I turn, only to remember this isn't the library. I don't know why I think it is. Our van is still parked on the plaza in front of it, now guarded by two young people with the skinny build of teenagers.

The library I want is on the other side of the plaza. It's a mass of concrete, built to withstand assault. The doors are locked, but I know about getting past locks.

Inside, everything is gray and cold, like the parts of the Bureau that were rarely used. The blue-white glare of the few working lights is accompanied by a soft hum.

Other than the hum, it's so quiet that I could believe this place is empty, except for the faint scent of garlic.

At the first stairwell, I set my back against the wall and check Gretchen's gun, which I'm still carrying, to see if I understand how to shoot it without hurting myself. Marcus should have taken our weapons. Either he's insanely self-confident or he expects that I won't figure out this model. I'm not even sure which button is the trigger.

Upstairs is the beginning of endless rows of blue-gray shelves, laden with books and labeled with letters and numbers that mean nothing to me. The sporadic lighting leaves some of the aisles in total darkness. The hair on my neck shivers every time I pass one, and the smell of old paper competes with the garlic. I can't walk quietly enough to not hear my own steps.

A rustle of voices pulls me down an aisle toward daylight. With my back set to the books, I can just barely see around the angle of shelves to a table beneath a window, where two gray-haired people in long dark robes are eating.

"You may as well stop lurking," one says. "We don't eat children."

"This may seem like an odd question," I say as I step forward, hands held up in a gesture that looks like peace but turns easily to self-defense. "I'm looking for the Erudite."

"We're two of them." The voice are genderless, like the Children of Peace. The faces have that neutral quality, too: the speaker's dark, the other light. "I'm Sharon. This is Gary. What are you?"

"A visitor. Paloma." My voice echoes a little before being absorbed by the weight of books.

"You brought the leader's son here today," Sharon says. "You broke in here. What do you want?"

"I didn't. . ."

"Logic," Gary says. "The doors are kept locked. Nobody would have offered you a key. You're alone. You broke in."

I feel the sick burst of shame like when my foster-mother caught me breaking a rule. She couldn't spot lies, the way Candor can, but she was hard to out-smart.

So I'll tell the truth, then. "I wanted to know what the Erudite here do."

"Nothing like the fools in Chicago," Gary says.

Sharon nods. "We're about pure knowledge here. That's why there are so few of us."

"What business is this of hers?"

"Gary, get her a chair."

The light-skinned one pushes zherself to zher feet, leaning hard on the table, then reaches for a crutch propped inside the window frame, where my eyes had missed it against the light. Zhe moves so quickly that it's only when zhe returns, shoving a clunky metal chair with one hip, that I see zhe's missing a foot.

There's a crutch behind Sharon's chair, too. I thank Gary and sit, trying to shift my chair so my back isn't to the echoing rows of stacks.

"You're staring like a four-year-old," Sharon says. Zhe kicks back her purple-ish robe to show a stump. "That's the price of knowledge. Anything worthwhile has a price."

"The fools in Chicago thought knowledge was the road to power, and so they were corrupted in their knowledge and dead to wisdom."

"We were on that road to ruin, and then our leader came and set us on the path of righteousness."

My stomach ties itself in a knot and tries to run up my throat. I've seen injuries from wars or accident, but to let yourself be maimed deliberately is different.

"We were doing better than in my grandfather's time," Gary says.

"Your grandfather was an old fool. We spent half our time arguing over the best methodology for distributing turnips. Marcus is practical."

"What about a bandit attack?" I ask.

Gary gets my meaning first. "There's Dauntless and the militia to protect us."

"She's thinking old Dauntless," Sharon says before I can resolve my confusion at _militia_ into a question. "They're all generals now. The factionless are the militia. It teaches them discipline."

I force my eyes to focus on the maps and books stacked between their plates of sausage and bread. _The Great War of Our Time._ _Invisible Armies. The Psychology of Terrorism._ If there's a way to send invisible soldiers to Chicago, we're doomed. I don't know if Evelyn even knows books like this exist: we have so few ex-Erudite among us.

"How often do you get new initiates?" I ask.

"Never," Sharon says.

Gary shakes his head and speaks around a bite of sausage. "We had one three years ago."

"She died in the lab explosion. Paloma wants to know about Erudite here now."

"She asked about initiates. Tanya was initiated. The first since the students abandoned us."

"She's dead."

"That doesn't make her not-initiated. Her initiation is still valid regardless of her subsequent fate."

"Why so few?" I interject before the argument can wind itself any tighter. The map beneath my fingers is Chicago, but not as it is now. There's no cleared spot for the wall, for one thing.

"Knowledge is a high and holy calling," Gary says. "Not for the weak, not for the many."

"They'd rather risk getting a foot shot off in Dauntless or caught in a thresher in Amity than pay our price up front. That, and nobody wants to be seen as a potential traitor. That's what your Jeanine made our kind. That's why we have to pay the price."

The truth clicks together. "This is to stop you from trying what Jeanine tried. But if you can make a mind control serum, what difference does it make if you can walk?"

Sharon laughs. "What Dauntless would trust someone who isn't perfect in body? We could make mind control serums into lollipops and they wouldn't take one from us."

 _You didn't refuse? You didn't fight back?_ I can't ask it outright. I've managed to not ask this question through dozens of cultures. I accept. I let people be who they are. I try to _remember._ This is a working civilization in a world without enough of those.

"He's very persuasive," Sharon says softly.

"The cowards thought it was better than being dead," a third voice, young and familiar, says. I turn, knocking over my chair, to see Gretchen standing in the opening of the stacks, adjusting her aim to keep her new gun barrel centered on my torso. She probably knows how to use it, too.

I raise my hands to show they're empty. If I dive under that barrel. . . but I don't know how fast she moves, and if I'm wrong, Gary or Sharon could get shot. I'm still deciding when she comes over to me to take her old gun from my belt.

"Come on, Paloma," Gretchen says. "Keep your hands where I can see them."

If I stall, it's possible that Gary or Sharon will help me. I need to assess the situation-

"Thank you, Gary," Gretchen adds. "Your call to Dauntless headquarters saved me so much time in finding her."

We're three aisles away before she tells me: "I would have found you anyway. Tobias said you'd gone to find the Erudite. He doesn't love me yet, but I'm going to be Dauntless and then he will."

"Why did the Dauntless tell you where to find me?" The bookshelves are too heavy to tip. There's nothing here but books, books, and more books, reeking of old paper disintegrating.

"Because they knew I was looking for you. If I can prove myself, then all I have to do is wait for my first birthday. I'll be Dauntless. Marcus will take Chicago. I'll marry Tobias. We'll all be happy ever after."

"I'm thrilled for you." I stumble on something that's not there and use the instant of catching myself to swivel and shove an arm behind a row of books, giving it one massive sweep that sends volumes tumbling into her shoulder, her arm, her hip.

It's a guess that she's not well-trained enough to fire at me by reflex, that she'll try to save herself from the falling books, first. . . but it's the right guess.

I run, not bothering with quiet. Speed is my only hope for escaping her. I need to get back to Tobias and warn him. We have to leave this place. There's no time to dodge. I sprint for the stairs, race down them three steps at a time with my hands on the rail for balance, dash across the lobby, and hit the doors at a speed that'll hurt me if they've been locked again, but they give way.

And I trip right into the arms of three waiting Dauntless. "Paloma Markham," the tallest one says. I consider denying it, even as they snap cuffs on my wrists. "You're under arrest for breaking and entering."

xoxoxoxox

The building they take me to is the one with rough brown stone and the tower, but I have no time for the ache of nostalgia. I'm hauled into an indoor amphitheater that centers on an ornate desk. The seats are dotted with pairs of people: one in handcuffs, one in a brown uniform. _Not Dauntless, but something like Dauntless. Militia._

The person behind the desk wears black robes, a white wig, and a blindfold. I'm almost to the desk before I can see that the people in the front row aren't prisoner-jailer pairs. A man in a green checkered shirt is recording the proceedings, while a woman in a pale blue smock reads a book.

"Two months of community service," the judge says to the prisoner standing in front of her desk. It's a burly red-headed young man with a scar on his cheek. My mind insists on _remembering_ him, even though his sentence isn't the memory serum.

Then I'm hustled onto the stage, off-balance from my cuffed hands. We stop so close to the desk that I wrinkle my nose against an acrid scent that might come from the wig.

"Paloma Markham on charges of breaking and entering," my left-hand captor says.

The judge places her hands flat on the desk. "We were informed. Clear the courtroom."

I clench my teeth against the word _no._ Even in bandit cities, it's usually to better to have witnesses. The locals may beat you or burn you or rip you to bits with their teeth, but at least someone will know.

It takes surprisingly long to empty the room of prisoners. The pair in the front row don't budge, so now I'm sure who they are. The man is the recorder. The woman administers the truth serum.

"So." The judge pulls off her blindfold and sets it neatly on the desk. Her eyes are pale blue, bright against dark skin. "Are you a spy from Chicago?"

"No."

"You'd say that anyway." She waves a hand at the woman in the smock. "Dose her, please, Sally."

 _Stiff,_ I tell myself. _Terrified._ I felt that way a moment ago. Old Candor could read body language, but there's only been five years of Candor here, and she didn't take her blindfold off until after I realized I was likely to be given the truth serum.

I make myself wince away as the injection gun touches my neck. The Dauntless grip my chin and force me to hold still. The injection spot feels cool, then hot, then cool again.

"Let her sit," the judge says.

I don't protest as the Dauntless deposit me in the front row of seats, beyond arms reach of the recorder or the medic. Going weak in the knees is a known side effect of truth serum. It doesn't hit everyone the same way. But still, muscle group by muscle group, I compel relaxation from my toes upward to my shoulders.

"What's your name?"

"Paloma Markham."

"Where were you born?"

"Saint Paul, Minnesota." I answer quickly, with the residual, resistible push from the truth serum giving my story momentum.

"Not Chicago?"

"No." After a deep breath, I let words tumble over each other. "I came to Chicago five years ago. The Bureau of Genetic Welfare rescued me from Saint Paul. I was ten."

"Enough. Why are you here with Tobias Eaton?"

"I drove. He's a terrible driver. I've seen him put a car into a ditch three times." It seems like the moment for a giggle.

"Are you a spy?"

"No. I work with his mother. She wanted someone to take care of her little boy."

"Are you here to spy on us?"

"No."

I want to appraise her expression, but if I'm truly under the truth serum, I won't be able to focus my eyes that well.

"Are you Divergent?"

 _Is this good or bad here?_ My instant of hesitation is already too much. "I don't know."

"She's lying. Take her into a cell."

I force myself completely limp as the Dauntless pull me from my seat, hoping this will make it _obvious_ that I'm under the truth serum, or that if it doesn't, my dead weight will slow them down enough that I have a chance to do something. Get me into a public place where I can scream, let Tobias hear me, give me a chance to make a run for the van.

The taller Dauntless heaves me over his shoulder like a sack of flour. I can kick him in the groin, but I'll bet it's armored, and even if he drops me, there's another Dauntless right there, plus three more people. I don't kid myself that I can take an armed Dauntless when I'm unarmed, much less two of them.

If the judge walked with a crutch, I could use that, and her clumsiness, as a distraction. . . but her stride is perfectly smooth, rhythmic at half the pace of my pounding heart. If the Dauntless carrying me feels that, they'll _know_ I'm not under the serum. . .

The room they take me to is just big enough for the six of us and two chairs. One is a perfectly normal chair, like what Gary brought me in the library, and the judge sits in that, crossing her legs neatly beneath her robe.

The other has arms, a tall back - and restraints at the ankles, wrists, chest, and forehead. My chair.

It's surprisingly comfortable after the van seat and random beds. I've never heard of anybody thrashing under a heavy dose of truth serum, but people sometimes pass out from the memory serum. I'll need to act confused. Maybe I want to thrash. If the memory serum worked on me, I'd become conscious in a strange place, so I ought to be scared, not relieved to be almost through this rigmarole.

The judge props one elbow on her knee and rests her chin on her hand. "The fear serum, I think, Sally."

My thrashing is genuine but does me no good. The injector touches my neck.

Cold.

Hot.

Cold.

Silence.

xoxoxoxox

The scream goes on forever, so long that it can't be one voice.

I open my eyes to fire.

For three heartbeats, it's nothing but a flickering wall of destruction, then I inhale a thick, pungent fug that isn't wood, isn't plaster. . . it's something from the Fringe, but I'm in my childhood bed with the patchwork blankets. The button eyes on the ragdoll in my arms glitter in the light. There's still no sound but the screaming.

If I hold out my hand, I feel nothing - no heat, no air currents - but when I toss a pillow into the flames, it goes up instantly. I shove at the window beside my bed, hands slipping on a sash that's too heavy for me.

The sash flies up with a crash and I'm crawling out onto the porch roof, my feet cracking and slipping on shingles, my balance tilted by the ragdoll I mustn't drop. I'm teetering on the edge of the porch roof, daring myself to jump, when flames spurt out the window, touching my nightgown.

I need water. Now. Jumping like a Dauntless could break a leg, rolling on the roof will set it afire, and I have only one more breath to decide. I'm going to jump. I have to jump.

With a crack of thunder, the sky opens in rain.

The fire is out instantly, and so is the screaming.

Rain plasters my shirt and pants to my body as I grasp the ragdoll in my teeth, grip the edge of the roof, and turn to let my body swing down. It's not so far to drop after all.

I land in a puddle. I shouldn't get the ragdoll wet, but there's nowhere to get dry, so I follow the road past burn-out houses as the rain turns it into a river. The deeper the river, the higher the buildings rise, until I'm standing on the bridge behind the Merciless Mart, watching the Chicago River rush by.

"You killed me," the ragdoll says. Her blue button eyes accuse me.

I mustn't drop her. No matter how she grows and twists in my hands, no matter how her yellow yarn hair tangles my fingers as it dries in the cold gray morning light, I _must not_ drop her. I'm responsible for her.

"You killed me."

It's Cassandra's voice. But she's not in the river. I'm not _letting_ her in the river. "You're safe."

"I'm dead. We're all dead."

Cassandra gestures with one floppy arm, and I turn to see her duplicate. "Deanna."

"You killed me." The voice comes from my other side. Tristan from the Children of Peace is wrapped in an oversized tunic, a bruise purpling zher cheek. "You killed me." The click of beads is Gretchen, identical to the other three except for her long braids.

"You killed me."

I don't recognize this voice at all. I spin, trying to find it, but there are only identical ragdolls: Cassandra, Deanna, half-dressed Tristan, braided Gretchen, Cassandra, Deanna, Tristan, Gretchen, Cassandra, Deanna. . .

There's a fifth ragdoll, flickering behind the others. I grab for her, though it means letting go of Cassandra. She eludes my reach like a shadow, but I _need_ to catch her. I have to see her.

My hand closes around a cloth wrist and I yank her into view.

"Tris. Beatrice Prior." I've seen her only from a distance, five years ago, but I know this. "I didn't kill you."

"Didn't you? You're from the Bureau. You're the reason I'm dead."

"I didn't know anything about it."

"You can't evade responsibility that way. You killed all of us. Look at your choices." She points to the back wall of the Merciless Mart, where the drying rain has raised writing on the stones. _Run away from home. Study xenopsychology. Go to Chicago. Abandon your family. Abandon your foster-mother._

Other words blur before I can read them, but I know these are my choices, all of them, as the blocks crumble free of the Merciless Mart and tumble over me, and I take Tris by the shoulders and shake her, though Tobias would be so angry at me, and the other four ragdolls join hands to dance around me, dodging the falling stones.

 _The rain came when I called it._ "Stop." I don't believe it the first time I say it. "Stop. Stop!"

"No," Tris says. But the Merciless Mart stands, despite the gaps in its wall, and the dance is over.

I turn to point at Gretchen. "You're not even dead." Then to Tristan of the Children of Peace. "Neither are you." _Go,_ I think. _Go back where you came from._

Their button eyes exchange glances, then they touch hands and walk toward the Merciless Mart.

"You're not dead, either," I tell Deanna. I can hear the question in my own voice, but she believes me and turns toward the building.

"But I am," Cassandra says.

"I know. I'm sorry. It was Tobias' choice, not mine. Go back where you came from."

My stomach plummets, but my eyes won't shut as she takes a step back and drops into the river, vanishing between the current.

"I'm dead, too," Tris Prior says. "You can't disown responsibility for me. You were part of the society that killed me. If anyone had stood up for honest treatment of Chicago, I wouldn't be dead."

My foster-mother argued for compassion in science a thousand times, but I'm not wasting her name and her memory on this.

"You killed yourself when you threw away your gun."

Her stitched face is entirely blank. "It was a sacrifice for the good of Chicago."

"You could have saved Chicago and walked away if you'd kept your gun. Go, Tris. Go away."

"Not until you see what you've done. Do you know anyone here?"

The street that felt empty before is busy now. Of course I recognize people. There's Johanna, leader of the city. There's Christina, brandishing a clipboard at a man whose mane of golden hair marks him as Leontari. I've gone out for drinks with the two men walking arm in arm, but not together -

There's Evelyn, walking with her shoulders hunched, so much like Tobias in her posture that my heart cramps. "Evelyn," I call, hurrying after her. She pauses, turns, looks at me.

Her face is as blank as Tris'. "Do I know you?"

"I'm Paloma Markham. I work in your office."

"I'm sorry." The way her brow crinkles, she genuinely _is_ sorry. "I'd recognize you if you worked in the test kitchens."

She's gone before I can ask if she's Evelyn Johnson, but she _answered_ to Evelyn. It can't be a coincidence.

Running the other direction means I catch up with Christina. Her smile dissolves as she looks at me. I don't need to say my name to know that she _doesn't remember me._ Neither will Johanna, neither will my friends, neither will anybody.

"They've been given the memory serum," I say to Tris. "The Diligent got to them."

"You should know."

"I don't understand."

Her yarn mouth curves itself into a grin. "There's nobody in Chicago who remembers you at all."

In the instant of denial, my mind coughs up a vision of myself pouring green liquid and watching it turn to vapors. _But I'd never. . ._

My feet carry me through the streets of Chicago, past familiar faces with eyes that look right through me, past shoulders I grab and release, past voices that echo _who are you? have we met?_

"I'm Paloma Markham," I say over and over, but nobody's met her, nobody knows her, nobody remembers her. I'm visible, I exist, I brush past solid bodies, and yet, _I'm not here._

In front of a white marble building with pillars, I stop, gasping, bent over against the cramps in my side. I know this place. It's the building in Saint Paul where the Bureau found me. But they don't remember me either. I can bruise my knees falling on the steps, I can sob the way I did when I was ten, and this time there'll be no one to save me. They've all forgotten me,

I did this to myself. If I could dig my fingers into the marble, I would. I'd bang my head against the steps, dissolve them with tears, and burrow into the stone so that I didn't have to feel the echoing loneliness of saying _I'm Paloma, I belong here_ and getting nothing but silence in response.

"Paloma," a voice says.

My breath catches. If it's Tris, mocking me, I'll suffocate myself on her rag body, I swear it.

"Paloma." There's heat burrowing through my veins, then cold. "Wake up, Paloma. I've given you the antidote, but it works faster if you move. We need to get you out of here."

My eyes open on an angular, olive face. "Evelyn," I breathe.

But it's not Evelyn. It's the mother of Marcus' other son. The silent and submissive Akallabeth isn't so submissive after all.


	7. Chapter 7

_**A/N:** Four, Marcus, and their backstory are the property of Veronica Roth. __**Trigger warning:** Serums play a large role in the plot, with the resulting loss of autonomy to people dosed with them. There is also physical and psychological horror._

* * *

One knee won't bend, and when I get it moving and stand, the other crumples under me. My stomach feels hollow, my head aches, and my pants are damp and stink of urine.

"How long was I under?"

"More than a day." Akallabeth puts a hand under my elbow, too tentatively to give me real support. "Come on, Paloma. We don't have much time for your daring escape."

I want to cringe from the dim corridor. We're halfway along it, stumbling and aching, when my brain registers that it's like the library: bars of grayish light, one of them in three lit.

"There should be guards."

"I used the renewal potion on them."

"They'd still. . ."

"I sent them to find a left-handed screwdriver." She pushes us through a door, and I'm wrapped in cool, damp air. The street lamps make the night only a little dimmer than that corridor. The way frogs or maybe crickets echo in the empty streets makes me think it's after midnight.

We're halfway across the square where I parked the van before I look back and realize it's not there. Patting the pocket where I kept the remote would be a tell.

"Your vehicle is safe."

"I shouldn't have been able to control the fear simulation." I want to slap a hand over my mouth to put the words back in. _Akallabeth must have visited me twice._ _She got the remote and then came back for me._

"Word is that you're immune to the truth serum. But you're not Divergent?"

The library's windows glow eerily. What if one of the Erudite is awake and looking out? They work all night, they always did. Then we're past it, in streets of pinkish brick buildings. There's someone in the field planted with vegetables. . . no, it's a stuffed effigy to scare away birds.

"Nobody knows what Divergent means any more."

She's silent for the length of six paces. "It's too soon for everybody to have forgotten about Divergents. Do you mean that people disagree about what it is?"

"Yes. I'm immune to the truth serum, but the fear serum. . . it hits me much worse than normal."

"Do you normally stay under longer than the dosage indicates?"

I need another six steps to make sense of that question. "I don't remember. I was ten when the Bureau tested me."

"Did they ever test combining a serum you're immune to with the fear serum?"

"The serums were meant to belong to each faction. No one should ever be exposed to more than one at a time."

The memory of Christina, giggling and telling knock-knock jokes under the combined influence of the Amity and Candor serums, makes me stumble.

"Truth's a menace, science is a public danger." She says it wearily, as if it's one of the aphorisms loved by the Children of Peace.

"The serum that I'm immune to allowed me to be lucid under the one I'm not immune to."

"It's a hypothesis." Akallabeth herds me through a bottleneck of trees and pinkish buildings, toward a low mass of friendly brown stone with arches and chimneys.

"You're Erudite."

"I have my feet." She guides me toward a breezeway between two segments of the friendly brown building. "This is the house of the newly reborn. Your name is Estelle. Can you remember that?"

"The memory serum. . . I'm immune to that, too."

"Pretend. You have vials of it in your pocket. You must have seen how it works."

Inside, I'm enveloped by nutmeg, lemon, and pine. This place is old like the oldest parts of Chicago, with floors worn into curves and woodwork polished smooth. Akallabeth pushes me into a large room covered in tile and starts at the fastenings of my shirt.

"I'll do it," I say. My fingers are awkward, and I end up needing her help to slip out of my filthy pants. She positions me in front of one of the row of shower heads and turns on the spray with a movement so firm and deft that my brain finally registers that she's done this before, many times. Hardly a drop of water hits her gray dress.

She leaves me to scrub myself clean. My hair's matted with sweat, so I wash that, too, with a soft mass of soap that stings scrapes I don't remember getting.

When I'm done, Akallabeth is standing behind me, holding a towel. Once I'm half-dry, she combs out my hair, smoothing it with herb-scented oil as she murmurs the house rules. There are times for sleeping, working, studying, and eating. I must follow them exactly.

It's simple enough. It gives me a routine, and with a routine in place, I can find the gaps that will allow me to slip away and find Tobias. She settles me in a bedroom by myself - "because you came in so late" - and leaves me with a roll, a chunk of cheese, and a mug of chamomile tea.

The bell that awakens me is too loud to do anything else. In the minute of panic that follows opening my eyes, all I see is an unfamiliar white-walled room and the tray beside my bed with a half-eaten roll. _I don't remember coming here. . ._

But I do, through the fog of sleep. Akallabeth has left clothing on the plain chair in the corner: underwear, jeans, a shirt patterned in faded pink and dull green, house slippers shaped like rabbits. Everything that was in my pockets is in a messenger bag. . . no, not everything. The memory serum is there, but she hasn't returned the van remote.

When I find the dining hall, I'm one of the last to the long tables. There's a plastic chair between a man with a bald spot, who hands me a bowl of oatmeal, and a redheaded woman who's deep in conversation with the person on her other side.

"I'm Estelle," I say to the man. The oatmeal tastes of nothing.

"You'll want syrup. I'm Bob." He slides a pitcher toward us from the center of the table.

"Thank you." I don't realize until after I've poured it that the syrup is infused with bits of red berries that float in my oatmeal like blood clots. But it's sweet, and if I don't look at it. . . it's not as bad as eating fried insects, which both crunch and spurt. "Is this your first time here?"

"Only the leader knows." Bob turns to me with the broad grin of a child. "The leader takes our sins upon himself and sets us free into a new life."

 _Stupid question, Paloma._ Only I'm Estelle now, and the key to succeeding at an undercover mission is to think of yourself as exactly who and what you claim to be. I'm Estelle. I was born yesterday.

That excuses my stupid question, at least. There are mottoes painted above the windows in big, blocky letters. All but two words seem more like piles of letters stuck randomly together. My stomach goes cold and heavy. _Did mixing the serums wipe out my ability to read?_

"I know _Experientia docet,_ but what do the others say?" I ask Bob.

"You can read that? It took me more than a week to read plain English, and my mentor says I'm Erudite material."

Under the table, I kick myself hard in the ankle. My foster-mother threw a tantrum at starting with simple board books about talking animals. "I don't know. I just recognized it. What are the others?"

"They're all in different languages. Nobody here knows them."

"Then why are they here?"

"They've always been here. Our leader came to change our hearts. The words are nothing."

The writing doesn't seem like it could be faded from something darker or more definite, so it hasn't been here long. Five years ago, people like Sharon and Gary were in charge. They knew what these words meant. They put them here for a reason.

I don't remember it. _You never knew it,_ I tell myself, trying to tame with deep breaths the accelerating pulses in my wrists and throat. But I must have studied Madison at some point. I knew about the Leontari. I knew about the matriarchy in Minneapolis and the complex marriage customs there. Madison was between the two settlements, so why wouldn't I have studied it?

"Take a drink of water," Bob says. When I look at him blankly, he adds: "The panic. It's normal, the first time you realize how many burdens have been lifted from you. So few people are ever truly free that we don't know how to deal with it, at first."

 _Farming collective,_ my brain supplies once I've gulped half the glass of water. _Run by the professors. Descendants of the professors._ _Modeled on ideal communities from ancient times._

"Why learn things, if it's just a burden? Why not stay free?"

"We are called to service. The good of the community requires that we take up the burden of knowledge. The perfectly free person is alone and cannot survive. Oh!" His voice changes on the last word, losing the cadence of memorization. He points toward Akallabeth, who's walking the aisle between tables with the briskness I remember from last night. "She's the leader's chosen one. She's looking at you."

"I don't know why." That's true. "What does it mean?"

"She's the leader of Abnegation. It's an honor, if she's interested in you."

 _I can act surprised,_ I remind myself against a deep breath. Everybody expects me to be surprised about anything and everything. They don't know what I'm surprised about or my normal level of control.

I thought Marcus would be the leader of Abnegation. He _was,_ back in Chicago. He wears gray here. The difference was probably trivial. No, it is _not_ trivial that Marcus, as a Divergent, has set himself up as ruler of factions without belonging to one.

"Estelle," Akallabeth says. Her voice is low, but it's firm, like last night. No _I am unworthy_ when she's away from Marcus, then. Is it only him that she's unworthy in comparison to?

Bob nudges me and whispers, "Call her ma'am."

"Yes, ma'am?" Had they used this word in old Chicago? It seemed too far away to remember: the far side not just of miles, but of years, separated from here and now by the wall and the monitoring screens and endless vials of serum.

"You're to serve tea to Marcus. It's simple. Come along, Estelle."

When I look down at my slippers, she adds: "There are shoes for you in the foyer."

The shoes waiting for me are my own boots, shinier than I've seen them in months. Slipping them on makes my stride seem firmer, so much that Akallabeth puts out a hand to slow me. "You were renewed last night," she whispers. "This is all new to you."

I breathe in, deeply, trying to fill my lungs not just with the sharpness of morning dew or the sweetness of flowers, but also with the memory of how my foster-mother walked, that first day after her memory was taken from her.

Mostly, she sat, looking at her hands and trembling. Nobody knew what was happening to us or what to do. My neighbors in Saint Paul ran, but they were fleeing. . . something. Deanna, sitting across from me with her kale smoothie that I'd dosed with memory serum, smiled as she looked around the Water Tower Place atrium, but even Deanna seemed subdued.

 _Be Deanna._ Walk as if I'm still in slippers, lifting my feet so that I don't revert to shuffling. Look around, but blankly. It's okay to reach out to touch: a pink flower, a pinkish building, a lamp post. Turn to look immediately at the revving of a motor or a shouted greeting.

I trip on the step down from sidewalk to road. Akallabeth steadies my elbow. "It's all right."

It's not all right. If I pay attention to everything - the slight chill to the morning breeze, the shadows of the leaves against the pink stone buildings, the sound of birds and bicycles - then I can focus on nothing. I don't know what's important.

I narrow my attention to two clusters of things: the road ahead of me and Akallabeth beside me. The road's simple enough. It's smooth, with fresh-looking blacker patches, so the Diligent have some way of fixing it, and they bother. They pick up litter, too. A scrap of paper blowing in the wind looks out of place. And they move walk briskly, with their hands busy: pushing a cart or steering a bicycle or carrying a box or cradling a baby. The one man standing still in a doorway is holding a broom.

"They're all so busy," I say.

"Slackers don't loiter in view of the leader's window."

Her voice is level, neutral. Akallabeth isn't one for facial expressions. Maybe like Evelyn, she's had them beaten or starved out of her. Her hands, when she helped me shower, were soft and without callouses. Her gray dress is as long as the old Abnegation gowns but not as baggy. It skims curves but isn't tight where farm work would have given her muscles. She could have been indoors for the whole past five years, and all traces of life before that, erased.

"Abnegation are shells for the service of others," she says.

 _Aren't all the factions supposed to serve?_ I stop myself from asking it because Estelle doesn't know about factions. Estelle knows nothing but that we're climbing the steps to a tall building. Estelle _doesn't remember_ that this is the tower with the leader's apartments.

It isn't difficult to treat this place as unfamiliar. Tobias and I were hurried through the lobby and up an elevator, not too differently from how Akallabeth hurries me now. She guides me into a room that isn't Marcus' chamber. It's very small, with no window and just a set of white-painted cabinets and equipment that I realize, almost as if I _had_ been memory-wiped, is a kitchen.

"Do you know how to make tea, Estelle?"

I nod. "Yes. I think so."

"Get it ready. When you hear a bell, bring it on a tray."

When she opens a second door to leave, I catch a glimpse of light and distance. The greeting she murmurs is answered by Marcus' voice.

There's a kettle sitting on the stove, so I fill it and start water heating. For the other tea fixings - the tea itself, cups, a tray, the tiny biscuits - I have to go through the cupboards and drawers.

In the second drawer down, I find the remote control for my van.

Next to it, nestled between two wooden spoons, is my gun in its holster.

Akallabeth has a plan.

Strapping the gun to my waist, beneath my shirt, seems obvious. I check first that it's loaded, which it is. The remote goes in one pants pocket.

A memory serum vial comes out of the other pocket. I can't believe she doesn't intend me to use it. Most tea won't hide the flavor, though. Unlike the sweet Candor truth serum or the faintly salty Amity mellow serum, the memory serum tastes bitter.

She probably doesn't know that. I look through the cupboards for a tea that's meant to be strong and bitter, one that's can be loaded with milk and honey.

The labels on the jars of herbs don't tell me much, once I'm beyond the familiar. I have to taste, hoping the scent and astringency of powdery dried leaves is accurate to how they'll steep. Chamomile, peppermint, dandelion. . . all these I know are too weak. Horehound. My nose wrinkles against the taste. This might work.

The voices through the door aren't quite distinguishable, but that's a problem that can be fixed with by holding a glass to the surface.

"What do you have, back in Chicago?" Marcus says.

"That depends what you left us." The voice belongs to Tobias. Maybe it's the glass that distorts his tone, so he doesn't sound defiant.

"I've just given your mother a few things to keep her busy. I don't want Chicago destroyed. It's my home, too."

"You were exiled."

"The city needs a stronger hand than Evelyn can give it. She's losing her grip."

"Mostly because you're greasing it."

"Merely hurrying along an inevitable process. You could be leader of the Dauntless again."

The whistle of the kettle drowns out Tobias' answer. It shouldn't matter. The temptation shouldn't make my hands shake so the hot water sloshes on the scuffed counter. Tobias hated assuming leadership of the Dauntless, we all _knew_ that, it was insane of Marcus to even bring it up when that was why Tobias had _beaten_ him. . .

"Another beating like that," Tobias says.

Marcus chuckles. "My boy, that was all symbolism. I'd do it again if that's what it took to make a man of you."

I hook the tea ball gently over the rim of the pot and step back from the acrid fumes. Milk in its pitcher. . . honey in a shallow pot. . .

Thinking a beating builds character made sense for Dauntless, but not for Abnegation. If Tobias were truly Abnegation at heart, it shouldn't have worked.

 _The memory serum didn't work on Tris. Marcus is more Divergent than Tris._

My hand moves to pour out the tea and start over. There's no point in risking dosing Tobias with the memory serum if it won't work on Marcus. By the logic of the Bureau, Marcus should be immune, as Tris was immune. But Tobias isn't genetically perfect, despite having Divergent parents.

Keep the tea. Let him wonder.

"All right," Tobias says, and I don't know what he's agreeing to, but my blood chills anyway. _Maybe we're going home now. Has he even asked where I've been for the past day?_

"You won't regret this," Marcus says. "We can start by updating the map of Chicago. That should be easy work for you."

 _Tobias has sold us out._ I want to charge through the door, but that can't be Akallabeth's plan. I want to reassure myself that Tobias is laying a trap for Marcus, but Tobias doesn't know how to lie like that. He withholds information. He doesn't tell direct falsehoods. He ought to have tested Candor, at least.

"If you hadn't shown me how happy the factionless are here. . ."

"People are happiest in their right places. That was the true secret of the faction system. Everyone needs to believe they belong somewhere. It doesn't matter if what puts you there is a test or the judgment of your team leader. The random way of life advocated by your mother doesn't meet that need."

"I know." There's a pause, and then Tobias says: "Paloma should have stayed to see this."

"She never intended to listen to me. The plan was always to dump you and run back to Chicago."

Marcus claims to be Candor, but Marcus lies.

I pour the vial of memory serum into the tea because that's what I've come here to do. Maybe Marcus isn't immune. He's Candor, and he lies.

He's Dauntless, and he lets others fight his battles.

He's Amity, and he spreads discord.

He's Abnegation, and he's completely selfish.

He's Erudite - and unless he's completely stupid, he's going to recognize me.

A bell rings. I steady the tea tray on one arm and open the door with the other. _Look as if you don't remember,_ I remind myself against the pounding of my heart. It's not difficult to walk hesitantly. The tea tray is heavy and unbalanced. Tobias' face is shading from purple to yellowish green as his bruises age.

Marcus, seated in his big chair, pats Akallabeth's curly hair as she kneels at his feet. "This is a surprise," he says.

"Her name's Estelle."

Tobias gawks at me as I set the tray on the table, pour a cup of tea, and flavor it with milk and honey. My hands move so delicately that they surprise me by not shaking.

Marcus' hand is warm as it brushes mine to accept the tea. He drains the cup in a single long swallow and looks at me, then at Akallabeth. "She wasn't memory-wiped at all, was she, dear?"

His free hand tightens around Akallabeth's neck, and I'm not standing for that. I pull the gun from my waist and level it at Marcus' head. "Let her go."

"Paloma, don't," Tobias says. "He won't hurt her. He's a just leader. We need him in Chicago."

I shoot.

What happens next makes sense only in the instant after it happens. Akallabeth is pushing herself backwards on her knees, away from Marcus. Tobias slumps in front of his father, one hand to his stomach, whimpering.

My second shot goes cleanly through Marcus' forehead, and he sags in his big chair.

"Are you okay?" I ask Akallabeth before I go to Tobias.

"Yes." She pushes herself to her feet. Her face is red and her hands ball into fists.

"He tried to save you." My entire body feels slippery with sweat.

"No." She stands just beyond the pool of blood growing around Tobias. "He tried to save his father."

She holds out her hand for the gun, and I give it to her, even though I know where this is going, even though I'm going to have to go back to Chicago and tell Evelyn about it.

"This is for Cassandra," I say as Akallabeth puts a bullet through Tobias' brain.


	8. Chapter 8

_**A/N:** Chicago, the Bureau, Four, and Evelyn are the property of Veronica Roth. __**Trigger warning:** Serums play a large role in the plot, with the resulting loss of autonomy to people dosed with them. There is also physical and psychological horror._

* * *

I wait for the sound of running feet, but the building is eerily silent.

"The empty rooms beneath us mean you have a few minutes." Akallabeth hands me back the gun, and I holster it. "Here's a key to lock out the elevators except the one you're using. Go to the third floor, wait for the ruckus to start up here, then use the stairs to get out." She rattles off directions to find my van.

"What happens to you?"

Her tight smile reminds me of Evelyn. "I take over. In the name of my son, of course. But it doesn't matter. Before he's seven, we'll have the old council restored. We'll do it better, this time."

"You were Erudite?"

"I have my feet, remember?" She gives me a little push toward the door. "The professors called me a coward when I hid in the crowd, but they saved my life by never naming me as a student. Now go."

I go. I have to dodge into an unlocked room when the elevator opens, but these people have no more experience with crime investigation than we do in Chicago. They race past me down the hall to Marcus' chambers, and it's easy to slip into the elevator.

The drop to the third floor seems to take forever, and the wait for a moment to run down the stairs takes longer than that. I lose my way three times in the maze of trees and pinkish buildings before I find the van, then I'm inside it, starting the engine with slippery fingers. In minutes, I'm on the road, working my way past the little frame houses of Madison, wondering when the outcry over the death of the leader is going to catch up with me.

Thirty minutes along I-90, my brain decides there'll never be pursuit, and I start crying. What begins with blinking tears in my eyes turns into a blinding flood of weeping. I pull over and sob until I gasp for breath, bent over with my forehead on the steering wheel, not sure what I'm crying for.

Tobias was a murderer.

Maybe all the Dauntless were. Tris killed her friends when a shot to the knee would have been enough. Dauntless murdered, Erudite plotted, Amity sold people out for the sake of peace, Candor insisted truth was black and white, and Abnegation put a pious mask on the people who most wanted to rule the world.

My foster-mother's people somehow thought this would heal humanity.

I dry myself off on the tail of my shirt and drive south toward home. The road's as quiet as it was on the way here: just a truck or two, and late in the journey, a pair of motorcyclists who whip past me with a wave.

On the outskirts of the old Bureau, the Fringe has been cleaned up into machine shops and small factories. The long rows of brick buildings were always here, but they used to be half-hidden among encampments of the unwanted.

My stop at the Bureau is to change into clothes that aren't stained with Tobias' blood. I could swap outfits in the back of the van - I _do_ put a jacket over my shirt, so I won't shock people - but I want a shower. I want water flowing over my body. I want to scrub every inch of myself, as if blood has caked in my pores.

I stop at one of the Bureau cafeterias afterwards, because I can't tell if the emptiness in my stomach is hunger or nausea. I'm staring at the pots of soup when a touch joggles my elbow.

 _Mother._

Alice Markham is looking up at me with the expression I remember from when I fell down a flight of the Bureau's moving stairs, skinned both knees, and lay at the bottom, wailing and refusing to let the medics touch me.

"You look like you need a mother," she says. "I know I'm not. But I was. I don't know."

"I do," I say. The hug is awkward in its half-familiarity. She smells of the wrong perfume and the right self. _Mother._ I start to cry again, and then it's easy to let her guide me to a table in a far corner and spread honey on toast for me.

When I get to the end of my story, I'm repeating "I'm sorry, I'm sorry" over and over, and I don't know for what.

"It sounds like you did your job, Paloma." She pats my hand. "My old self. Did she want you to do these things?"

"Sort of. Not like this. I was going to sit in an office. I shouldn't have left you. I should have found a way to stay." The final sentences burst out of me like the last in the series of shuddering coughs.

"That's probably true," Alice Markham says. "What do you want to do about it now?"

She sounds like my foster-mother then, giving me a question rather than an answer. I don't know, and it's very important that I _do_ know, that I've given this enough thought for my regretting leaving her to be real.

"Can I - may I - visit? And call you?"

She looks me over, eyes sharp behind her glasses. "Yes." Then she squeezes my hand and goes on. "I've thought about knowing my past self, and I think I'm ready. But Paloma, I'm not her. I'm like. . . a younger sister to her. Can you handle that?"

"I think I need to."

On the last miles through warehouses and railroad culverts, back toward where the shiny towers of Chicago point their fingers to the sky, I wonder if I should try to find my parents in Saint Paul. Would I recognize them, after fifteen years of their being other people?

When I reach Evelyn's office, she's standing at the window, watching the train clatter past on its repaired line. The city is, I realize dully, still standing. The Diligent didn't destroy it in the two or three days that we were gone.

"I got a radio call," Evelyn says. Her gaze drifts past my shoulder. "The woman said my son sacrificed his life in the freeing of Madison from Marcus Eaton. Is this true?"

"Yes. I'm sorry."

"She said she was Marcus' widow."

"Akallabeth."

"That was the name." Evelyn's mouth twists. "I guess we're both Marcus' widows now. We need to determine the legal standing of a marriage when one party changes cities. There are _so many_ damn little problems we don't have answers to. And then my son checks out of the whole thing so he can be with Tris."

"He died bravely." It's not a lie, any more than Akallabeth's tale of self-sacrifice is a lie. We could pass the old Candor truth serum, if the questions were phrased right. But I'll never need to.

"He _died._ That's not how my son should be. I would have raised him. . . I wanted. . . a person's supposed to live on and fight another day. We're supposed to see the aftermath." She smacks a hand against her desk. "I wish it was possible to just forget one thing or two. Keep Tobias, lose the minute after that call. I have _work_ to do, Paloma."

"I'm sorry." I pull the last of the memory serum from my pocket and set the vials on her desk. "It's all or nothing." I can never erase the memory of Tobias sprawled in his own blood.

I can never erase the memory of Tobias telling me that he killed Cassandra.

I can never erase the memory of Deanna's blank smile after I gave her the memory serum.

"It's always nothing for me," Evelyn says.

Of course: she's Divergent. My brain hasn't caught up with everything I learned in Madison. She survived among the Factionless by being immune to so many things.

"Do you think it's awful, Paloma, that I never really liked Tobias as an adult? I wanted him to have a future, not spend his life eating cold beans in squatters' ruins. I wanted him to have an education. But he turned out. . . he turned out. . ."

"He turned out to be in charge of his own choices," I say. "Like we all were. I'm sorry."

She doesn't step away when I cross the room to join her at the window. Evelyn isn't a person who invites hugs, so I just stand there with her, shoulder to shoulder, watching the aftermath that we're here to sort out, watching the life of Chicago.

* * *

 _ **A/N:** A few additional credits. Akallabeth's remark about truth and science is from Aldous Huxley. Akallabeth is not, of course, the character's real name: she renamed herself at the time of Marcus' takeover, borrowing an Elven term for "downtrodden" from J.R.R. Tolkien._


End file.
